The Window on the Left
by Haleine Delail
Summary: In an ordinary suburban American home, the Doctor and Martha Jones find themselves in the midst of a multi-layered mystery that twists time out of shape and has implications for the whole universe. The fevered relationship between one man and one woman may save the human race, but does it mean they have to be sacrificed? Sex, intrigue, alien threats and time portals abound!
1. Chapter 1

**Hi guys! Did you miss me?**

 **Yeah, I didn't think so.**

 **So, this story picks up about five days after "Fail Safe" leaves off. It is not necessary that you read "Fail Safe" to understand what's going on here. This story is a totally different animal.**

 **But here's what you need to know about "Fail Safe": _The Tenth Doctor, through a bizarre set of circumstances, went rogue, like the Master. The bizarre set of circumstances involved becoming romantically involved with a post-Journey's End Martha Jones (who also went rogue for a while), and making the acquaintance of a UNIT physicist called Lawrence Fortis. In the process of deciding what to do about their rogue Time Lord friend, Larry and Martha's sister Tish met and began dating. Eventually, both the Doctor and Martha were pulled under control and made "good" again with the help of UNIT, and some of the last vestiges of compassion, humanity and love for her fellow man that Martha Jones possessed._**

 _ **Oh, and, Martha was fired from UNIT. They offered her the job back, but she opted not to take it.**_

 **And now, it looks like they owe UNIT their lives. Or at least their sanity. But our heroes would help, even if that weren't true, wouldn't they?**

 **This promises to be big and convoluted, and I just hope I can pull it off! Hope you enjoy!**

* * *

 _Early September, 2008_

It was a Friday… at least on Earth.

It had been five days since the Doctor and his lovely Companion had been subjected to several hours of testing by UNIT officials, to determine whether they were fit to be set free to roam the cosmos as they might. After a month-long bout of, as the Doctor had put it, feeling free from morality, UNIT was quite leery of the two of them. Even after they'd been put through the process of having their attributes targeted and their consciousnesses veritably turned inside-out through a localised black hole, the organisation had insisted that their energies be tested for ill intent, interference from outside sources, et cetera, et cetera.

The Doctor, in truth, wasn't sure how well those instruments worked, as far as what Colonel Mace and UNIT felt they needed to know about the two of them. But, he reckoned that resisting the tests in any way would be considered a sign of guilt. So he did it, and had advised Martha Jones to do the same. It made Mace feel better, as well as the team of physicists led by Dr. Lawrence Fortis, and the Doctor and Martha were sure, at this stage, that they were back to their old benevolent selves… so what harm could it do?

"I still have a headache," Martha complained at the end of breakfast on the following day. "Ugh. Do you think their blue beam gave me a tumour?"

He smirked. "It's probably just the wine from last night."

They had spent the evening at a wine tasting in Bordeaux; cheeses, fruits, various sauces, and of course, plenty of the Reserve blend being showcased at the centre of the whole affair.

"I thought good wine wasn't supposed to give you a hangover."

He smirked again. "Why don't you just take some paracetamol and go have a kip?"

"I feel like I've been horizontal, for one reason or another, for the better part of a month," she commented.

"You say that as though it were a bad thing."

"Well," she said, blushing. "Considering what was going on in my mind for most of that time, I…"

But she was interrupted by a phone call. Her iPhone buzzed in her pocket, and played the song _It's End of the World As We Know It,_ so she knew it was someone from UNIT trying to get in touch. She cursed as she pulled out the device and set it on the table.

"Should I answer it?" she asked. "It's probably Colonel Mace calling to check up on us."

It was a fair assumption, as Colonel Mace had phoned twice in the past five days, just as a "courtesy."

"You'd probably better," he said. "We don't want them to think we're dodging them."

"Yeah, as much as we would like to," she muttered. She sighed and pressed the button that would allow the apparatus to become a speakerphone. "Hello?"

"Hey, it's me," a voice said. It was Larry Fortis, UNIT physicist and, as it happened, boyfriend of Martha's sister Tish.

"Oh, hi, Larry," Martha said. "Nice to hear from _you_ , for a change. Mace got you doing his _courtesy calls_?"

"What? No," said the physicist gravely. "I need help."

"With what?" the Doctor chimed in. "You don't sound good."

"Larry, are you in trouble?" Martha wondered.

"No, not as such," he said. "But I've been called in on a case in the States, and…. I'm totally stumped. I think I need a Time Lord."

"Wait, you're in the States?" she asked. "Since when?"

"I arrived this morning."

"Are you in New York?"

"No, Colorado."

"Why?"

"Originally they'd called in operatives from the New York UNIT office, but when they got there, they couldn't identify a… never mind. It's a long story. Someone on the scene said she thought they needed a physicist, and the New York office doesn't have a physics department."

"They don't?" asked the Doctor.

"No," Martha sighed. "Only London and Tokyo have physics. New York and Rio have ballistics analysts and a forensic pathology team. Go figure."

"Okay…" the Doctor said, with a frown. "Why wouldn't London have those things as well?"

"Funding, I would think. I don't know."

"Anyway," Larry said pointedly through the phone. "There's this house… and things are _weird_ here, you two. I'm here, Dr. Enger is here… between the two of us, that's five Ph.D.'s and about forty years of experience, and it's freaking us out. It's like nothing we've ever seen."

"All right," said the Doctor. "We'll be there in a few minutes. Can you give me coordinates?"

"It's 12th September, 2008, three-twenty-eight p.m. in Denver, Colorado. The address is 434 South Niagara Street."

MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMW

 _Three days earlier…_

Diane Wesson drove west-bound down the street where she'd grown up. The dwelling was in the middle of a block on South Niagara Street, in Denver, as part of a neighbourhood that seemed frozen in time since the Post-War, American suburban expansion. It was a calm, sleepy little quarter; the houses were all single-story brick numbers, with a one-car garage and a nice square of manicured lawn.

Her mother, Lillian, now in her eighties, had rung ten minutes prior, frantic. Unable to discern what the elderly lady was actually saying, Diane had told her to sit tight, that she would be there in a few minutes – just as soon as she could get all of her gardening tools stowed away.

As she pulled up close to the house, she spied her mother, standing in the driveway in her tan velour jogging suit, with her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She was acting, as usual, as though it were freezing, though the temperature was very pleasantly hovering in the sixties. The garage door was ajar, and the Merlot-coloured Buick sat pristinely inside.

Diane parked her Honda at the end of the driveway (illegally), and got out.

"Mother, what are you doing just _standing_ in the driveway?"

"Had to get out of the house, and I am _not_ going back in."

"What? Why?"

"It is haunted!" She said each word in a very clipped, emphatic manner, as though she'd told her daughter a hundred times to no avail.

Diane sighed. "Don't be silly, Mom, now, come on…" She tried to take her mother's elbow and lead her back in.

Lillian pulled her arm away. "George McPhail came to the door."

"Mr. McPhail has been dead since 1979. Remember? You went to his funeral. We both did."

"Yeah, I remember. That's why I'm saying the place is haunted."

"Are you sure you're not just remembering a time when he _did_ come to the door, when he was alive? He _was_ our mailman. For years. I'm sure you have a lot of old memories of him knocking on the front door with a package."

Lillian frowned. Her drawn-on eyebrows crinkled, and her powdered makeup seemed to crack. "What do you take me for? I saw him _this afternoon_ , clear as day! Clear as I'm seeing you!"

Diane's mother could be abrasive, and frankly, Diane had begun to wonder if she'd been losing her marbles just a little.

"Well," Diane said, tutting. "What did Mr. McPhail say?" She put both hands on her hips in wonderment. She was a tall woman, and had always been slim, but noticed today just how bony her hips had become.

"Just the usual things he always used to say," her mother told her. "'Good afternoon, Mrs. Handler. Nice weather we're having, eh? So, how're John and the kids?'"

"And what did you say?"

"Nothing! I screamed and slammed the door!"

"Then what happened? Did Mr. McPhail knock again?"

"How the hell should I know? I grabbed my cellular phone off the table and came outside to call you."

Diane regarded her mother for a few moments. "Mother, are you sure it was him? There are a lot of guys who could look like Mr. McPhail."

"It was him, Diane," her mother insisted, with finality.

 _Perhaps removing her from here wouldn't be such a bad idea_ , Diane thought sadly. She looked at the blonde brick house, the one her parents had bought forty-two years ago, and her heart sank. She felt something ending.

"Okay," sighed the daughter. "Why don't we pack a bag for you, and you can come stay with me for a few days?"

"What good with that do?" hissed the mother. "When I come back in a few days, the joint will still be haunted."

"Well, what do you want me to do about it? Perform an exorcism?"

"Call someone!"

Diane laughed. "Who am I going to call? The Ghostbusters?"

"There's got to be someone."

"Mother, the only kinds of people who respond to calls like this are frauds. Crackpots! Whackos!"

"No, that's not true," said Lillian. "I heard about…"

"Yeah, I know, you saw it on one of those cable channels," Diane sighed, having heard about numerous _mediums_ her mother had watched on television, who seemed to have a link with the spirit world. "In any case, we can talk about it later. Let's get you out of the driveway." She began to tug again at the sleeve of the tan jogging suit.

"I am _not_ going back in that house, Diane. You can pack me a bag. Make sure to bring my spare teeth, my crosswords, my reading glasses, my girdle…"

"Yeah, yeah, I know the drill," the daughter muttered, making her way up the driveway and into the house through the garage.

"I'll wait in the car," Lillian said, making her way toward the Honda. She opened the door, climbed in with some effort, and settled into the front passenger seat, seeming to brood.

Diane took about five minutes to pack up her mother's everyday things, plus three changes of clothes. Then she closed the garage door and slid in behind the driver's seat.

"I know what you're thinking," Lillian said, darkly.

"You do, do you?"

"Yes. You think I'm crazy. You think I've finally gone over the edge… senile dementia, or some such. And you're thinking that you're taking me away from here where I've fallen into a rut that might be destroying my mind, and that possibly, you'll never be bringing me back to live here. You're thinking that getting me out of this venue will do me some good… that I need to shake out the cobwebs, and play with people my own age. You might even be wondering if you could take care of me yourself, full-time."

"Mother…" Diane said, her face heating up. Inwardly, she was cursing her mother's still very acute intuition.

"Well, that's not going to happen, Miss Diane. I am not ready for that yet." She turned and faced her daughter, and used an index finger to make her point. "So you take me to your house, but then you _call someone_ to get rid of that ghost so that I can live in my own house again. You are not going to use this as an excuse to put me in a rest home, have you got that?"

Diane started the car. "Yeah, I've got it," she said, blandly.

* * *

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	2. Chapter 2

II

Having promised her mother that she would call _someone,_ Diane got on the phone with a friend from college, who had taken one too many magic mushrooms in their younger days, and had all sorts of non-traditional ideas about life in the universe. She figured if anyone she knew would have a resource for this sort of thing, it would be her.

Thus she obtained the phone number of Destiny Melodia, a local psychic, and the following day, she found herself in her mother's house, watching Miss Melodia meditate on the living room rug.

The round, pretty, showy, middle-aged black woman spoke with what sounded like a muddled Jamaican/Nigerian/Louisiana Creole accent, when she tutted and boasted and counselled about her psychic abilities in the car on the way between Diane's house and her mother's.

But after a minute or two on the floor, she looked up at Diane, with complete seriousness in her eyes. With a stone-sobre, totally sane, local accent, she said, "There is something disturbing this house. All is not well. _Do not_ allow your mother back here. In fact, I'm not even sure _we_ should be here."

Melodia's words chilled Diane to the bone. She did not believe in psychics, but something about this house had made the audacious lady drop the psychic dog-and-pony-show, and become subdued.

"What do you mean something is _disturbing_ this house?" Diane asked.

Melodia closed her eyes and appeared to be trying to concentrate. She seemed to try and get comfortable, wiggling her hips a bit to settle into a better position, and said with a deep scowl, "Some _activity_ has descended upon this space."

"Do you mean like a ghost?"

"It's not a presence, it is _activity._ I don't know how else to describe it. And anyway, it doesn't feel like a human disturbance. It feels like… crashing. Like… two parts of the universe trying to occupy the same space at the same time… no, that's not quite it…"

Diane stared at her, while she continued to muse. She was torn between the creepiness and seeming earnestness of Melodia's words and manner, and the fact that her words sounded completely bonkers.

"Well, thank you for your time…"

Within two minutes, they were closing the garage door, walking down the driveway back to the car that would return them to Diane's house.

Destiny Melodia displayed a total lack of ability to describe what she'd felt in the house, her manner remained restrained on the car trip and after, as though she herself were as disturbed as Diane's mother's house. All pretence of an accent, or a particularly esoteric personality, was gone. Was this bit all part of the act?

Though tellingly, Miss Melodia did not accept payment.

"I am not the one to help you," she said frankly to Diane as she pushed the check back across the breakfast bar. The two of them, and Lillian, sat and had tea. "What you need is a physicist. Someone who knows about dimensions and fields of energy and things like that."

"Wow. You think?" asked Diane

"What does that even mean?" Lillian wondered aloud.

"Also, here's an idea: I know a Dr. Cheryl Cohen at the University of Denver," Melodia suggested. "She's a former professor of mine. She works for the theology school, but her background is in secular studies of comparative religion. Her mind is totally open to… _phenomena,_ shall we say, and maybe she can tell you something, that I can't. Something… historical, or psychological, or archetypal. Meta-physical. Supernatural. I don't know."

Diane jotted down the name Cheryl Cohen on a Post-It, and mused that perhaps she'd call tomorrow.

"Perhaps?" asked her mother, loudly. "What's this _perhaps_?"

* * *

Diane was out front, the following afternoon, weeding her mother's yard when a taxi cab pulled up and Dr. Cheryl Cohen climbed out. She gave the driver a bill, and said "Keep the change," and the car sped off.

Dr. Cohen was about five feet tall, with curly grey hair, an eggplant-coloured silk top and a chunky necklace with Egyptian symbols around her neck. She had an easy, sardonic smile and a peppy walk.

"Hi!" Diane said, wiping her hands on her jeans. "Thanks so much for coming."

"No problem," said Dr. Cohen. "I do a lot of these sorts of things."

"You do?"

"Yeah," shrugged the professor. "People think they have a ghost or something… who you gonna call?" She asked the question with a wink.

Diane chuckled, because she'd wondered the same thing.

"Well, anyway, thanks."

"I just hope I can be of some help."

They walked up the driveway and into the house through the garage.

"Now, what's the significance of the postman?" asked Dr. Cohen.

"Significance? I don't know how to answer that. He was our postman for years, from the time we moved here, until after I'd gone off and got married. Eventually he retired, but my parents sort of kept in touch with him. He died in '79."

"A friend who _brings things_ to the family," said Cohen, thinking. "Okay. Did he and your mother have anything in particular in common? Something they used to talk about?"

"Not that I can think of," Diane answered. "They both voted for Lyndon Johnson in '64, but didn't everyone? He used to like the banana bread my mother made for him at Christmas and Easter."

"Johnson… baked goods…What else do you know about him?"

"Erm," Diane said, thinking hard. "I think he never married, never had any children. He was from Florida."

"Okay, so a single man from a sunny place. A person might ascribe to him a certain air of _freedom_ than they might to someone, from say, Minnesota, with a wife and five kids."

"Wait, are you thinking that my mother hallucinated Mr. McPhail, based on his… what, his role in her life? The role he plays in her brain, in her memories?"

"I think there's a good chance," said Cohen. "Oftentimes in these cases, the manifestation is all in the subject's mind, and we find that there's a symbology involved. Something archetypal or personally significant – equally likely. It's like a waking dream. Only, it's more violent on the psyche because…"

Dr. Cohen was interrupted by a knock at the front door. Diane was interested in what the professor was saying, and she found herself irritatedly saying, "Hold that thought," as she went for the doorknob. She unlatched the chain, disengaged the locks and opened the door.

And there, clear as you like, was George McPhail, in living colour.

Diane gasped hard.

The postman gave two blinks when he saw Diane. "Oh, hello, ma'am," he said. "I've got a package for Mrs. Handler. Is she here?"

Diane's jaw hit the floor, and she began to hyperventilate.

"It's all right," said Mr. McPhail. "I'll try again tomorrow."

"Oh… oh… oh my God!" she spat. Her heart raced, and she instinctively stumbled backwards.

McPhail gave a mild exclamation, and lurched forward to try and help her, and Dr. Cohen did the same. They helped her to the sofa, where she continued to stare at the postman with utter disbelief.

"I'm sorry, have I done something?" he asked. He looked askance at Dr. Cohen.

"No, she's just not feeling very well today," the professor said calmly. "

"Can I do anything? Call an ambulance?" he asked.

Cohen suggested that maybe she should just let her friend rest with her feet up, and see what happens. Mr. McPhail agreed that this was best, and then he bade them good day, and left.

Cohen shut the door behind him, and locked it, engaging the chain once more.

"That was Mr. McPhail, I take it."

Diane couldn't speak. She just nodded.

"You're sure he's dead?"

Diane nodded.

"Okay, so… yeah, that's weird."

Diane nodded again.

"I might be out of my depth here," said Cohen. "I know of an organisation I can call on your behalf. I have an ex in New York who works for them."

* * *

By three-thirty the following day, Lillian Handler's living room was filled with officers from UNIT, though Lillian herself was nowhere near it. The place was stifling. Diane stepped toward the window on the right-hand side of the front door and opened the curtains, then slid open the window. She then did likewise with the same-sized window on the other side of the door. She smiled, took a deep breath, and felt much better.

One large, broad-shouldered man, Colonel Compton, seemed to be overseeing the operation while others moved through the space with instruments meant to measure… God knew what.

"So, you were married to Dr. Cohen?" Diane asked Compton.

He smiled. "No. We just dated for a couple of years. She's a firecracker."

"I could see that about her," Diane nodded. "How'd you meet?

"At a symposium on the supernatural," said Compton. "Led by this weirdo out of Philadelphia. Turned out to be total bunk, but at least I got a lifelong friend out of the deal. How is Cheryl?"

"Oh, I've only met her once," said Diane. "Yesterday. But she seemed all right. So nice of her to put me in touch with you."

"She likes to be of help. I'm having coffee with her this evening."

"That'll be nice," Diane commented. Then she eyed the officers in the living room with their machines and probes. "What exactly do those things do?"

"They check for traces of alien activity," he said.

"You folks think this might be extraterrestrial in nature?"

"Well, we don't know, but it's kind of what we do."

That was when the tall, disheveled British man with the glasses came out from one of the bedrooms. She had noticed him before, and the fact that he didn't wear a uniform like the others. He had gone in there a few minutes before, looking vexed, and shut the door. He was wearing grey trousers and a grey, orange and green broadly-striped sweater with a collared shirt underneath. As he emerged, he slipped his index finger behind his crooked spectacles and rubbed his eye.

Another Brit, a stouter black man of more average height and of a more generally put-together air, approached him. "Well?"

"He's coming," said the taller man.

"Thank Heaven," said the second man.

"Who are those guys?" asked Diane.

"Gentlemen," the broad man called out. "Please come meet someone."

The two non-uniformed personnel crossed the living room.

"This is Diane Wesson, she's the daughter of the owner of the house," said Colonel Compton. "Mrs. Wesson, this is Dr. Lawrence Fortis, and Dr. Abel Enger. Both of them are physicists with UNIT, in London."

Diane shook hands with both of them. "I'm glad you're here. The, erm… clairvoyant-type-person I hired suggested I needed a physicist, not a psychic. I thought that was curious."

"What's curious is that she knew that," said Fortis. "She sensed something?"

"Yes," Diane said. "It disturbed her. It was something strong… she wouldn't even accept payment."

The two physicists looked at each other in surprise. "Well, Mrs. Wesson, what we have found is…"

"Alien?" she asked, excitedly.

"Actually no," Dr. Enger answered. "Our instruments have not picked up any alien interference. What we have found is a _time_ anomaly."

"Excuse me?" she asked.

Fortis sighed audibly. "A time anomaly," he said. "Time, for lack of a better way to put it, has a mind of its own. It acts almost of its own free will."

"It _acts?_ "

"Yes."

"Are you serious with this?"

"Quite," said Enger. "Something is happening here… with time. We don't know what. The two of us are not at all qualified to work that out."

"Once again, I feel bloody helpless in the face of intangible energy with which I have no idea what to do. With which I wouldn't even have the first idea of how to _begin_ doing something," Fortis complained, almost with a bitter laugh.

"So, we've called in a specialist," Dr. Enger told Diane, while patting his colleague comfortingly on the shoulder. "He knows about this stuff."

"He knows about… time," Diane said flatly. "And how it… _acts."_

"Yes," Fortis agreed. "You think we're barmy, I can see that, but trust me – you ain't seen nothing yet. When the Doctor gets here, things will get a right sight weirder. I know this from experience."

"Has this been approved by Colonel Mace?" asked Colonel Compton. "I don't want to step on any toes, division-wise."

"It's fine," Enger assured him. "The Doctor is on the payroll. Not that anyone actually pays him."

That's when they heard the grinding gears, the squiggly sounds of time-travel growing louder upon the air.

"What in God's name is that?" asked Diane, covering her ears.

"That is the sound of… well, the universe's largest time anomaly, arriving here to help with a time anomaly," Fortis explained with a bemused smirk.

He pushed past his conversation-mates, and attempted to follow the sound. He turned right and found the back door, which opened up in the dining room. The TARDIS was materialising on the other side of Lillian Handler's backyard.

Fortis slid the door open and stepped outside, waiting for the Doctor (and probably Martha Jones) to emerge. Within ten seconds, they did.

"Jesus, what took you so long?" he joked.

"There was a jam-up on the motorway," Martha answered, shrugging. "Had to take the long way round."

He smiled. "Thanks for coming."

"No problem," the Doctor said, shaking Fortis' hand. "Hope we can help."

Fortis led them inside. Martha first, followed by the Doctor.

"Does Tish know you're in the States?" asked Martha.

"Yeah," Larry answered. "But..."

Immediately upon stepping foot in the home, the Doctor grabbed the doorjamb for leverage. He groaned, then cursed.

Martha turned, to find him slightly bent, and pressing his palm to his stomach.

"What?" she asked. "What's wrong?" She moved toward him, scowling with concern.

He stepped backward, out onto the back porch, and seemed to shake off whatever had come over him.

"Whoa," he said, running his eyes over the bricks and mortar and roofing, with something like fear. "This is going to be interesting."

"Why? What's happened?" Martha asked.

"Time Lord gut thing," he said. "This house has something fairly massive converging on it."

"Yeah, it made our Weirdness Detector go haywire," said Fortis.

"What the hell is a Weirdness Detector?" Martha wondered aloud.

"It detects weirdness, obviously," the Doctor told her, cheekily, and she gave him a dirty look. "My guess is that it's some sort energy or wavelength-measuring tool, of alien origin, and the good men and women at UNIT are not always sure what exactly it's detecting when it goes _ding._ "

"Exactly," said Fortis. "We don't know everything it does, and don't know what else to call it. Anyway, Doctor, are you doing to be okay? I mean, if you can't come in the house because your guts are on fire, that might be a problem."

"I can come in, I just have to… brace myself."

"Are you going to be sick?" Dr. Jones wondered.

"Maybe. I'm going to try not to."

"Do you have something you can take for nausea?"

"No," he said, grasping the doorjamb again. He set one foot inside the house, and then the other, very slowly. He stood just inside the dining room, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. "The only way to stave this off is… well, inner equilibrium."

"Can I do anything?" she asked, taking his hand, studying him with worry in her eyes.

"Just stand by," he said. "An airsick bag might not hurt."

"Okay," she said. "I'll be right back. With that, she ran out the door and disappeared inside the TARDIS."

"When you're ready, Doctor, I'll introduce you to the major players inside."

"Okay," said the Time Lord, opening his eyes. For the first time, he noticed uniformed UNIT officers milling about the smallish house. "Is this really necessary?"

"What?"

"All the uniforms. Can we reduce this to essential personnel only?"

"You've got it," Fortis said. He moved toward Colonel Compton, and said, "Sir, the Doctor is requesting that all non-essential personnel be dismissed."

"Well, not entirely," said the Doctor, joining him, carefully at the Colonel's side. "I just need them to wait outside, maybe."

Compton called out, "You heard the man! Everyone, take a breather. Get all those beepy things out of here, as well!"

The UNIT officers all made their way to the garage door. Since the _disturbance_ seemed to be somewhat focused on the front door, Diane and Compton had agreed that it should not be used, for the time being.

When the shuffling died down, Larry Fortis said, "Mrs. Wesson, Colonel Compton, this is the Doctor. His companion, Dr. Martha Jones, is outside taking care of a little task. Dr. Enger, I believe you already have met this man?"

"Yes," said Enger, shaking the Doctor's hand. "Very nice to see you again."

"Whew," Diane sighed. "Lots of doctors."

"Ah, well," the Doctor said. "The two of them, they're Ph.D.s, Martha's an M.D. and me, I'm just the Doctor. It's nice to meet you by the way."

Diane reached out to take and shake the hand he had offered her. "Just _the Doctor_?"

"Yes," he replied. "Is this your home?"

"It's my mother's home. I grew up here."

"And where is your mother?"

"At my house, about two miles from here, refusing to re-enter until we can guarantee that the 'ghost' is gone."

"The ghost?" asked the Doctor with wide eyes. "There's a ghost?"

In detail, Diane recounted the story from the time she had received the call from her frantic mother on Tuesday afternoon, including having seen the "ghost" herself, right up until the last few moments before the Doctor's arrival. Meanwhile, Martha had turned up with a couple of airsick bags, and was listening, catching up.

"The psychic told you that she felt _crashing_ happening in this space?"

"Yes," Diane confirmed. "She said something had descended upon it, but it wasn't a human presence. It was like parts of the universe trying to occupy the same space at the same time. Then she took it back, and said that wasn't quite it."

"That's one seriously astute psychic," the Doctor told her, eyes widened again. "She was very, very close to the truth."

"That's exactly what we thought," Enger chimed in.

"So, your mother's convinced that the mail carrier is a ghost," Martha said. "But the Doctor is saying there's a wicked time anomaly here. Okay – I'm starting to see where this might go."

Diane looked at the two of them in disbelief. "Are you talking about time travel?"

"Possibly," the Doctor said, absently. "Tell me about the mailman, Mr. McPhail, is it?"

"What about him?"

"What does he mean to your family? To your mother, or you?"

"Dr. Cohen already asked this," Diane said, exasperated. "She thought it might be some kind of psychological phenomenon."

"No, no," the Doctor lulled. "I don't think that. I'm fairly certain McPhail was not an hallucination. I'm just trying to determine why he's fixated on this house."

Diane shrugged, and as she talked, the Doctor commanded the room by pacing back and forth in it.

"He was our mail carrier," Diane explained. "For years. He came every day just past noon, including Saturdays. My mother would sometimes make it a point to have the door on the latch when he came, so he could stick his head in and say hi. I think a few times, she invited him in for coffee."

"Hm, okay. Did _you_ know him?"

"Sort of. I know _of_ him. And I saw him on Saturdays. If I was out front helping in the garden, or playing hopscotch with my sister, I'd see him. I mostly knew what I knew about him because my mother talked about him."

"Nice bloke, then."

"I suppose so. What does any of this have to do with his ghost?"

"I dunno yet, Mrs. Wesson," the Doctor said. "But some kind of time convergence is leading Mr. McPhail back to this house on a repeated basis, so knowing his relationship to the house and the folks who lived here might… by the way, you said you saw him yesterday?"

"Yes, I did. That's how I know my mother isn't nuts. That's the only reason I'd have called in the National Guard and physicists from across the sea!"

"We're not the National Guard, Mrs. Wesson," said Colonel Compton.

"Whatever," she said with a wave of her hand. "The point stands."

"What time was that?" asked the Doctor.

"Just after noon," Diane said. She seemed to realise something only then, for the first time. "That's what time he would come by, back when he was alive!"

"Mm," the Doctor agreed. "What about the day before that? Did he come just after noon?"

"No," she realised. "I was here with Miss Melodia during that time, and nothing special happened. Except she got freaked out."

"And the day before that?"

"That's the day that my mother saw him," she said. "Just after noon!"

"And today?"

"No," she said. "Nothing today."

"Okay, so, Mr. McPhail is somehow involved in something that appears to be on a two-day cycle," the Doctor announced, still pacing, now studying the room, looking at the walls, making mental notes of what he could see. "He turns up every other day just after noon."

"Yeah. What does that mean?" Diane asked excitedly.

"I'm not sure," he said. "But it does beg the question, what is he doing on the day in-between?"

"What is he _doing_? What's that supposed to mean?"

He stopped pacing then, about six feet from the window to the left of the front door. He turned and took a good long look out the window, and he appeared to be deep in thought.

Then he resumed his pace, and after walking the length of the room one-and-a-half more times, he repeated the action in front of the window on the right.

Compton, Fortis, Enger and Wesson only saw a man pacing. Dr. Jones could see he'd got the scent of something.

"What is it, Doctor?" she asked.

He took her hand and pulled her forward. "Excuse us, gentlemen, Mrs. Wesson. I'm going to need a moment to confer with my companion."

He led her as close to the right-hand window as possible. There was a brown canister-swivel armchair and an end table in the way, but they were able to have an unobstructed view out the window.

"Look across the street," he whispered. "What do you see?"

Martha said, "Red brick house, big mint-green car in the driveway. Why?"

"Big mint-green car," he said. "Classic car. A 1963 Ford Fairlane Town Sedan."

"Okay," she said, nodding. "Now you might as well be speaking Chinese."

"It's in pretty good shape, don't you think?"

"Sure."

"But, you can tell it's been driven a lot over the past forty-five years. New hubcaps, the bumper's been dented a few times. The paint has gone matte over most of the car, except look at the front fender on the driver's side. It's shiny. It's been replaced."

"Yeah. Okay."

"And that red brick house," he continued. "What about it? What else do you see? Railings? Curtains? Vegetation?"

"I see yellow curtains in the front window," she answered, still whispering. "Red geraniums in a pot on the front porch, some sort of vine growing in the garden box."

"Good."

"Thank you," she said. "Are you going to tell me what this is about."

"Come here," he whispered, pulling her by the hand to the opposite window. "Look across the street. What do you see now?"

"Red brick house, big mint-green car in the… ohhhh!"

"Yeah."

"What the hell?" she asked, louder than he would have liked.

"Shh," he lulled. "What do you make of the car?"

"It's brand new, clearly. Shiny paint all over, no nicks on the bumper, the hubcaps are different…"

"…original. What else?"

"The curtains in the front window are printed orange and white. And the flower pot has something purple in it!"

"Mm-hm."

"Oh my God!" she hissed.

"The window on the right is looking into 2008. The one on the left is looking into some other time."

* * *

 **Hey, thanks for reading! Don't forget to review!**


	3. Chapter 3

**So... the dead mailman has been coming to call. One of the windows looks out onto a September afternoon in 2008, and the other window looks out on some other time... let the weirdness begin!**

* * *

III

Martha moved toward the front door, opened it, and peeked out. The Doctor went toward the garage door, opened it and disappeared through it.

She observed purple flowers in the pot on the front porch across the street, and a brand-new mint-green car. She stepped outside a few paces, looked up and down the block and remarked several new-looking "classic" cars parked on the street, and a man in a black suit and a hat approaching, walking his dog.

She called back inside, "Larry, what's the Doctor doing?"

Larry disappeared from view, then she heard, "He's standing out on the driveway, looking up and down the block just like you are. Can't you see him?" Larry called back to her.

"Not as such," she said, distractedly. "Ask him what he sees."

A few moments later, Larry reported, "He says he sees red geraniums, an old green car, and a couple of neighbour kids with mobile phones. And he wants to know what you see."

"Purple flowers, new green car, man in a suit walking his dog."

She faintly heard Larry reporting thus back to the Doctor.

She turned around and looked back through the door. As far as she could tell, she was standing sometime in the 1960's, and Dr. Enger, Colonel Compton and Mrs. Wesson were standing in the living room, looking at her quizzically from 2008.

She found that she was afraid to let them out of her sight.

But then, Larry appeared in the doorway. He looked out onto the driveway. "That's weird. He was just there. And where is the UNIT truck?"

"Can you see them through the window on your right?"

Larry looked. "Yeah!" Then he swung back around and looked through the door.

"Cue profanity," Martha muttered.

"Holy shit!" he exclaimed.

"I know, right?"

"Oh, I said it was gonna get weird once we called you two," he said.

"Oi," she protested. "We don't _cause_ the weirdness…"

"No," he agreed. "You just know how to find it. Put a name to it. And you thrive on it."

"What can I say? I love my work."

"What's going on?" asked Diane, having heard enough cryptic nonsense

"I'll tell you as soon as I know," said Larry, a bit dismissively. He then heard the Doctor calling his name, so he went to the garage door. A few seconds later, he called out, "Martha, the Doctor says he wants you to go out, and see if you can walk through the garage and back into the house through the garage door."

"What?" she asked, her heartbeat increasing.

He reappeared in the front doorway. "He says to see what you can find. I'm supposed to stand here and wait for you, and see what happens."

"Okay," she said, nervously. "Don't shut this door."

"Okay. Martha what the hell is this?"

"I'll let you know in about forty years."

"What?" he asked.

She didn't answer. She just walked toward the driveway, checking every few seconds to see if the purple flowers were still in the planter across the street. They did not move. When she reached the driveway, the garage door was down. She turned and faced it, and looked at Larry, who was scowling with wonder.

She bent to see if the car's entrance door would be light enough for her to lift, and half-hoping it wouldn't be. But it was.

"What do you see?" asked Larry.

"An old car," she called back to him. "Or a new one, depending on your point of view. Shiny black… looks like a Chevrolet. There's a stuffed toy bear in the back window."

Larry reported this back into the house. Martha could faintly hear Diane Wesson's voice, higher-pitched, declaring something undoubtedly coincidental.

Though Martha suspected that she was telling everyone in the room that her family had had a black Chevrolet with a bear in the back window when she was a teen.

"Here goes nothing," she sighed, and stepped into the garage. She reckoned she was about to walk into some kind of swirling vortex of nothingness, or else into someone's inhabited home, sometime in the 1960's, whereupon she would scare the bejeezus out of them.

She inched toward the door that led into the house, then reached out slowly for the knob. A lump settled into her throat, and fear gathered in her chest, but she reminded herself that the Doctor wouldn't have sent her in there if he really felt there was danger. He just wanted to see what would happen.

When she turned the knob and cracked the door, she could see that the inside of the house was what she would find, and not, indeed, a swirling vortex. She didn't immediately hear anything, but wasn't daft enough to believe that meant no-one was home.

At first, she just looked about, without coming in. Some of the furniture was actually the same. Same canister armchairs by the window, but a different sofa. Same dining room table and chairs, but here there was an oak sideboard against the nearest wall, rather than a desk with a computer on it. The photos on the wall were of teenaged children, not of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

She then heard a noise coming from somewhere in the house. It sounded like a voice, though she couldn't make out any words. She imagined the Doctor asking her what the sound was, whose voice it was, why it wasn't saying anything, and she didn't want to have to tell him that she hadn't investigated at all. Even though he would understand, she wanted to be able to report. Besides, curiosity was getting the best of her.

So, she stepped inside. She noiselessly closed the door behind her, and noticed that the curtains on the two front windows were shut, as was the curtain covering the glass on the back door.

She followed the voice. Upon a closer listen, she could hear that it was actually two voices. And they weren't talking, they were exclaiming. Making only sounds, but no words.

She had a hunch what she would find…

She moved softly toward the hallway and looked around the corner into the bedroom.

Surely enough, a man and woman occupied the bed. The man was on his back with his hands on the woman's haunches. She had flaming red hair, and wore it in large ringlets around her ears and down her back. She was astride him, and grasped his knees with her hands, leaning back as she moved up and down on him and the two of them both moaned and intermittently shouted the nonsense of pleasure. Of course, neither of them was wearing a stitch of clothing, and the bedding was in total disarray.

Martha hopped out of the way, as the man's face was positioned so as to see her, should his eyes stray from his partner's bouncing bosom, where they were locked. And when she changed position, just before she turned and hurried back through the house, she spied some clothing tossed over a green armchair near the far wall. It looked like a pair of greyish-blue polyester trousers with a black belt, and a light blue work shirt. On the floor nearby, a pair of polished black leather shoes lay, tossed aside. Somewhere in the mess, she thought she saw a blue and red seal with a logo.

She tiptoed as fast as she could manage, hearing the sounds of a daytime tryst as it grew in intensity, back through the house, toward the garage. She exited, shut the house-door and the outside door behind her, and found Larry Fortis standing in the jamb of the front door.

"Well?" he asked, stepping aside to let her back into the house.

It was a weird feeling re-entering. She had just been in this house in a different time, slightly different furniture, different drapes, carpet, upholstery… a slightly different all-around feel. And she hadn't had to use the TARDIS, or have the Doctor with her. Something truly weird was occurring.

She realised that Larry had asked her a question, of sorts. She opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated. "I need to speak to the Doctor. Where is he?"

"He went back to the TARDIS. He said he wanted to take some measurements," Larry told her. "What did you find?"

"I'd rather not say, just now," she answered. "Mrs. Wesson, does your mother have a family photo from, say the mid-sixties, somewhere in this house?"

"Erm, yes, I could scare one up. Why?"

"Just investigative stuff," Martha answered, attempting to sound casual.

"Okay…"

Diane moved toward the hallway and Martha followed. She entered the master bedroom, and approached a bookshelf on the far wall. She squatted down and seemed to be looking at the dates written on the spines of some photo albums. Martha stood in the doorway and waited.

She chuckled inwardly. She had _just_ stood in this very spot, and had been witness to a _very_ different scene. In the past, there had been no bookshelf there, but rather a green armchair with discarded clothes thrown over it. The bedspread was beige with chocolate-brown vines, and looked modern. Though she hadn't really got to see the rumpled bedspread before, she bet herself that this one was different.

Diane said, "Here we go." She stood up and placed a photo album on the bed, and flipped through it. She pulled a small rectangular photo from its adhesive corners, and held it out toward Martha. "Here you go."

Martha took it. "Thanks. We'll get it back to you as soon as we can," she said.

"I'd appreciate it," Diane said, then smiled uncomfortably.

"When was this taken?"

"Summer of 1965," Diane told her.

Martha studied the photo momentarily. It was an image of a mother, father, and three children, the oldest of whom was definitely Diane, and she appeared to be about sixteen. There was a second daughter in the photo, about twelve years old, and a son, maybe eight.

The mother in the photo wore her hair in the same way as the woman she had seen, panting and moaning in this very room just a couple of minutes before. But the photo was in black and white, so Martha asked, "What colour hair did your mum have back in those days?"

Diane chuckled. "Flaming red," she answered. "Like Lucille Ball!"

Martha smiled. "She was a pretty lady."

"She surely was."

* * *

Martha excused herself out the back door of Lillian Handler's home and joined the Doctor in the TARDIS console room. He appeared to be studying the computer screen.

"What did you see?" he asked, looking up anxiously.

She walked up the ramp. "Well, a black car in the garage, though I'm not good with cars – I don't know what kind. It was old, though… well, new. 1960-something."

"Right."

"Went through the door, and there was the same house, except with a different sofa and curtains and whatnot."

"Okay. Pretty much what I would have expected."

"And," she said, stepping up close to him. She brandished the photo. "This woman athletically shagging what I would imagine was a very happy man."

"Oh!" the Doctor exclaimed, taking the photo from her, with eyebrows raised, and an "o" shape about his lips. He pointed at the photo. "And this is Diane's mum, yes?"

"Lillian Handler," she answered, with a nod.

"Are you certain?"

"Well admittedly, I didn't see her face – her back was to me. But her hair was in the same style as in the photo," she told him. "And according to Diane, her hair was flaming red…"

"Just like the woman you saw?"

"Yep."

"Okay," the Doctor sighed, staring at the photo. "And the man that you saw with her? Diane's dad?"

" _His_ face I did see. It was definitely _not_ Diane's dad."


	4. Chapter 4

**The mysteries are piling up! Enjoy!**

* * *

IV

The Doctor sighed, pulling his hand down over his face, groaning a bit. "Blimey. Are you sure it wasn't her husband?" he asked Martha.

Martha indicated the photo. "If this is her husband, then the bloke I saw her… you know, _bouncing on,_ was not her husband. The man in the photo is dark-haired, and has a wider face, with a deeper brow ridge. The man I saw in the house was a lot more doughey. Better-looking, frankly. And his hair was a lighter shade."

"Well, what else did you see in there? Any clues as to who he might have been?"

"I'm guessing he was the postman, don't you think?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "I'm guessing that, too."

"I mean, you'd asked why Mr. McPhail seems to be fixating on their house," she pointed out. "Shagging the lady of it would be a pretty good reason to keep him coming back."

He looked at her wearily. "Even across time. Men are all the same," he joked.

"Not all of them," she argued, with a smirk. "But anyway, I saw his clothes flung over an armchair. Greyish blue trousers and a light blue work shirt. It seemed a bit… _institutional_ to me, even for the 1960s."

"Sounds like a postman."

"And, just before I got the hell out of there, I saw a logo amid the pile of clothing. I don't know if it was on the shirt, or what, but it was a red ring, with blue in the middle, and some kind of shape… maybe an animal? Like a deer or a horse?"

"Mm," the Doctor nodded. "The U.S. Postal Service used a Pony Express rider in its logo until they switched to the trademark eagle in 1970. Where was his mail bag?"

"How should I know? It was probably on the other side of the bed where I couldn't see it."

"Well anyway… the red and blue seal was used from 1965, until 1970."

"Well, good, that gives us a timeframe," she said.

"Yeah, but what I can't work out, Martha, is why a two-day span sometime between 1965 and 1970 is descending upon a sequence of days in 2008, and scaring the pants off some old lady and her daughter!" he exclaimed. He ran his hands through his hair, and began to pace round the console. "So yeah, we have a time frame, and we have a reason why George McPhail would fixate on that house. But I'm sorry, I know men are wired a certain way where matters of the flesh are concerned, but even a guaranteed tumble with a fiery redhead wouldn't be enough to allow a man to rip a hole across time… especially when he's entering a time when said fiery redhead is in her eighties, and, I'm guessing, is no longer fiery in the way he would like."

"So he must have actually _loved_ her."

He stopped and looked at her for a moment, with realisation, a bit of longing, and a touch of admiration. "The power of _love_ has been known to rupture time," he conceded. "Or, you know, open wormholes that traverse the universe and threaten to toss entire planets into black holes."

He was referring to something he himself had done only a week and a half ago, in a lovesick, rogue state. The woman he loved had walked away, and he was on a mission to destroy her, and her planet, if he couldn't have her.

She smiled softly. "But George McPhail is hardly a Time Lord, Doctor," she said, gently.

"No," he agreed. "But think about it. Even in my desperation, I still knew there was a way I could get you back. I could stand down and agree to make things right. I knew you wanted to be with me, and I _could_ be with you, if I cooperated. So I swallowed my pride and submitted – reckoned it would be worth it. But McPhail… if you're right, and he was in love with Mrs. Handler… well, she had a husband and kids. In 1966, or whenever it was. It's quite possible that the postman was only a dalliance for her. There might have been _nothing_ that he could do to have her at his side for real, as his own. And that…"

"…would make a man a bit despondent."

"Yep. A bit, or a lot, dependent upon the man."

"But could a human being ever become despondent enough to rip a fissure in time and overlap the sixties with 2008?" she asked, somewhat breaking up their reverie.

He let out a cry of frustration and mussed his hair. "Arrrrgh! I just don't know, Martha! I don't think so! It just doesn't seem to gel… I mean, in my mind. I have never heard of, or conceived of a human that could accomplish something like that. Which is, let's face it, one the reasons I like you lot so much."

"It is?"

"Of course. Humans come with so little baggage – it's brilliant. Me, on the other hand… Time Lords are _baggage personified_." He began to circle the console again. "Case in point: walking into that house, you saw me get woozy. Saw me when my stomach tied itself in knots."

"Yeah, I suppose you do drag debris from all over the place with you, everywhere you go."

He took a pause from talking, and just thought. Then he said, "But time anomalies happen. They happen, and they don't make me want to vomit. This is something more."

"I don't understand. How could it be something more?"

"In a number of ways," he answered. "Too many to count. But in any of those cases, it would be way too big for someone like George McPhail to accomplish on his own."

"Okay, so…"

"Listen, McPhail may not have been a Time Lord, but I still am. I'm going back into that house. Bring the airsick bags, Martha."

He marched down the ramp and out the door, and Martha chased after him, airsick bags in-hand.

* * *

Diane Wesson, Colonel Compton, Larry Fortis and Abel Enger sat at the dining room table having coffee. The UNIT men had their laptops open; the physicists were doing calculations and analyses of the test results they'd come up with before the Doctor had arrived, in an effort to help. Though, Fortis reckoned there was very little that their computers could tell him, that the Doctor wouldn't know just from having walked through the room. Colonel Compton was working on his report, which he was required to file electronically at the end of every day. Diane was helping him with the details.

The Doctor and Martha Jones burst through the back door quite suddenly. The former said nothing, but made a beeline for the living room, with an affixed scowl. The latter said an uneasy "Hi."

"Hi, what have you found?" asked Fortis.

Martha gave him a perplexed look that let him know that it was _something_ , but she wasn't going to share just now. He didn't know if she couldn't, wouldn't, or if she just wasn't sure how to express herself.

The Doctor again paced back and forth, right in the space where all the "action" was. He reckoned that if there was a precise apex of this time convergence, it was in Mrs. Handler's living room, right around the front door. Right there where the postman arrives.

After about a minute, he stopped, bent at the waist, and steadied himself on a piece of furniture. He seemed to gag. Martha approached, put her hand on his back, trying to lull him, and handed him one of the bags. He took it with thanks, and a squeeze of her hand, but didn't use it. He equalised his breathing, grew calm, and continued to pace.

He did this for several minutes, stopping every sixty to ninety seconds or so to be almost sick.

"If he is unwell, then maybe he shouldn't be working," Diane suggested.

"No, the _unwell_ is part of the work," Martha said. "He's going to be fine, we just have to let him do his thing."

"Can I get him something? Tums? Pepto? Nausea suppressant? My mother's got it all in her medicine cabinet."

"It's the _house_ making him sick," Fortis said to her, gently.

"The house?"

"Not the house, exactly, but whatever's happening to it. Your psychic friend could feel the disturbance because… well, whatever. She's psychic. But the Doctor is a hundred times more sensitive to stuff like this. A million times."

"So by being miserable, he might figure out what's going on?"

"Maybe," the Doctor himself interjected, stopping momentarily to look at them. "Mrs. Wesson, is there anything you're not telling us?"

"Pardon me?"

"I don't mean to sound accusatory, but is there any information you're keeping from us?"

"About what?"

"About your mother. This house. About Mr. McPhail. About how he used to drop by a bit past noon each day."

Her face scrunched into a quizzical expression. "What do you want from me? He was the mailman! How much information do you think I'd have on the darn mailman?"

"I dunno," he said. "Are you sure you're not, say, protecting anyone? Trying to keep family secrets secret?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Okay, well, in that case, I'm very, very sorry, Mrs. Wesson, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Are you kidding?"

"I need to confer with my colleagues, and it would be easier to do so if you weren't here. Again, I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"There are certain intelligences that I need to discuss with them... we'll call it _classified._ "

"But this is my mother's house!"

"I know that," he said. "Would you please wait outside? Go through the garage, if you would. Step on into the UNIT truck – they'll get you some coffee and a cruller."

"I've got coffee here! And my mother's Pineapple Upside-Down cake."

"Please Mrs. Wesson? I know it's asking a lot, but I promise we won't be long."

Diane stood up grudgingly, with a _hmph_ , and stepped through the garage door, out into a cool September afternoon in 2008.

Once she was out of earshot, the Doctor clapped his hands loudly and said, "Okay, so… Diane's mum was shagging the postman."

"What?" Fortis asked, with a big smile. He couldn't help but grin goofily – this was unexpected and juicy.

"It's true," Martha said. "Saw it with my own eyes."

"I thought the postman was dead," said Colonel Compton.

"He is," Martha told him. "But when I went through the front door and then came back in through the garage, I saw them. In that bedroom, right there. I saw them, all naked and panting."

"What do you mean came back through garage and saw them?" Compton demanded.

"I saw them in a different time. In the 1960's."

"You're talking nonsense."

"The reason we called the Doctor is that there's a time anomaly, right? We worked out that much just with our own instruments," Fortis said to the big man.

"Right."

"Well, if you'll notice, the view out the window on the right in the front there, is different from the view out the window on the left."

Compton stared at Fortis for a few seconds, with his mouth open. "That's ridiculous."

"Go look."

Compton stood up angrily and stalked to the living room. He stood before the window on the right, and the Doctor joined him.

"See?" the Doctor asked. "Notice the red geraniums in the pot across the street, and the well-lived-in Ford Fairlane in the driveway. Not to mention the giant truck containing twenty-five officers from UNIT, and their equipment."

"Mm-hm."

"Now, step this way," said the Doctor, taking the man by the arm, and pulling him to the left. "Out this window, you may notice that the flowers in the pot across the street are now purple, and the Fairlane is new. And if you'll lean in a bit closer…"

"Jesus Christ! Where the hell is the truck?" he shouted, as he looked at the spot where the UNIT vehicle should have been parked.

"Wrong question," the Doctor said. "You should be asking _when_ the hell is the truck."

But Colonel Compton didn't hear him. He moved back and forth between the two windows frantically, cursing each time he moved.

"The tree is bigger on this side… that car next door… the… the… Obama/Biden sign in the yard down there… holy _fuck_ , Doctor!"

"I know," said the Time Lord, calmly. "Pretty weird, eh? The window on the left is showing you a day sometime in the late 1960's, while the one on the left is showing you 12th September, 2008."

Compton stood in the living room, feet apart, hands on hips, scowling at the Doctor. "I want to know _right now_ what's causing this!"

"I wish I could tell you _right now_ ," the Doctor said, before having to steady himself against another wave of nausea. When he recovered, he said, "But all I know is it's something _big_ , big enough to turn my Time Lord guts to mush. And Dr. Jones and I are fairly certain it has something to do with Lillian Handler having an affair with George McPhail, we just don't know how, what, or why yet."

Larry stood up from the table and crossed to them. "Are you _fairly certain_ of that because… well, you know."

"I know?" the Doctor asked.

" _You know_. The two of you have recently been through a torrid and tumultuous adventure that nearly destroyed the planet. Are you sure that you're not projecting?"

Martha joined the conversation then, because the Doctor, once again, doubled over with nausea. "Think about it, Larry. One of the things we _do_ know is that this phenomenon with George McPhail turning up at this door happens every two days, just past noon. The Doctor wondered aloud earlier, just what McPhail might be doing on that other day. I saw what he was doing on the other day _._ "

"I'm fairly certain it's a two-day cycle," the Doctor said, again, recovering. "I think that each time he comes to the door, it's the same day for him. After he leaves here, presumably, the two-day cycle starts over again for him. Only on 'this side' of the phenomenon, time keeps marching on."

Martha's eyes lit up and darkened all at once. "Oh! Can we be sure of that? How can we be certain that we're not on some kind of time loop as well?"

"I'd most likely be able to sense it," he said. "But with the two time periods overlapping here, my Time Lord mojo is overwhelmed. I suppose, just to be on the safe side, I'll have the TARDIS scan for a temporal repetition pocket."

"Anyway," Martha continued, to Larry. "We're talking about a two-day span in the life of a man and woman who seem to be at the epicentre of a major time anomaly. Are you telling me that you really believe there's a chance that the fact that they were clandestinely shagging each other rotten on one of those days has _nothing_ to do with the anomaly?"

"Admittedly, it seems fairly unlikely that this is a coincidence," Larry conceded.

"Whoa!" came a voice from the dining room table. "What the…?"

"What's wrong?" Larry asked Dr. Enger, who was staring at his laptop with total confusion.

"I… I have no idea! Doctor, have you ever seen anything like this?" Enger replied.

The Doctor, Martha, Fortis and Compton all moved toward the table. The Doctor peered over the physicist's shoulder.

"Yes, I have," he said, gravely.

It was a blackened screen with a series of what looked like numbers and letters flying past, from right to left. But the characters looked like total gibberish to the humans in the room. They were foreign, rounded letters, with squiggle patterns that linked one character to the next.

"My computer's doing it too," announced Compton. "What's going on?"

"Mine too," said Fortis. He squinted at the screen. "What is that, Sanskrit?"

"No," said the Doctor. "It's Rehengese."

"What's Rehengese?" asked Dr. Enger.

"The language of Reheng, a planet, oh, about ten galaxies away."

"Can you read it?" asked Fortis.

"Yeah, I can," said the Doctor. "It's part of a battle plan for overtaking the Earth."

"Okay, so now, we've got, what, a bigger-than-your-average time anomaly to deal with, as well as an alien attack?" asked Martha. Then, she sighed. "Well, a day in the life with the Doctor."

* * *

 **Hope you're enjoying yourself. Don't forget to leave a review! ;-)**


	5. Chapter 5

**This chapter is weird, I'm not gonna lie.**

 **Disclaimer: I'm not computer savvy, so I don't understand code or firewalls. I tried to make some sense, but... well, we'll see how it goes. ;-)**

 **I also don't know much about autism. Sorry if I make any _faux pas_ in dialogue or descriptions...**

 **So, in addition to the time anomaly with the mailman, the laptops are all going nuts with an alien signal, indicating an impending invasion... 'cause you know, the Doctor doesn't have enough stuff to worry about.**

* * *

V

The Doctor dashed out through the garage door, and met four UNIT officers who were coming up the driveway in a panic.

"Doctor!" one of them called.

"Let me guess," the Doctor said. "All of your computers have gone wonky with nonsensical symbols sliding across the screen, and your override protocols are failing."

"Yeah!" said another officer. "What's happening?"

"An impending invasion by the Rehengese, my friends," the Doctor answered. "Assume crash positions. Though, you'll have to go analogue because I'd wager that if you looked at every computer on the planet just now, you'd find the same results."

Martha joined the confab on the driveway just then. "Every computer on the planet?"

Without answering, the Doctor moved quickly toward the UNIT truck. The uniforms, and former Chief Medical Officer, followed. He took the steps two at a time and swung open the door. He found chaos inside, twenty-five or so officers, milling about, trying to apply their knowledge and equipment to the situation at-hand. Diane Wesson was sitting in a chair near the door, looking incredibly confused.

The Doctor ordered a young man out of his seat and sat down before a screen, threw on his glasses, and squinted.

The young man who had just stood up, he said, "We don't know what it says. We're waiting on translation services…"

"Firewalls all over the planet Earth were down for five minutes today, which allowed them entry," read the Doctor, without, of course, needing a translator. "They don't know how it happened, but they've been waiting for an 'in' on one of the level-5 planets. You have water, oxygen, soil, nitrogen and… well, other resources that they need."

"So, they're going to eradicate us, and take the Earth?" asked Martha, remarkably calmly.

"Eventually," said the Doctor. He pulled off his glasses and turned to face her, speaking to her as if there weren't two dozen other people standing about, listening, eager to hear the details. "I've dealt with the Rehengese before. They have this insidious technology, this icky, wormy way of doing things. It's what makes them so nasty, their primary M.O."

"What does that mean? They have wormy technology?"

"My guess is that they are beginning the attack this way because… well, do you remember the Y2K scare?"

"Yeah. I don't like where this is going."

"If they can get into the planet's PCs, or even just the ones that were switched on at the time of their attack, pry their way in while the standard firewalls are down, then they can probably use the internet, radio waves, television signals, mobile phone signals, everything, to get into… well, everything. Electrical grids, cars, public transport… And they've likely been watching. They know what will happen if you lot are left without electrical power for any length of time."

She nodded. "They know they can reduce the civilised world to anarchy."

And from there, it will be easy for them to take you out."

"Okay," Martha nodded. "How much time have we got?"

He exhaled through pursed lips. "Four days. Maybe more, maybe less. But four days is my best guess."

"How do we fight them off?" Martha asked, impressively determined.

"We might start by working out how every firewall on the planet got pulled down," he said. "Because according to the communiqué from the Rehengese, _they_ are not the culprits – they simply took advantage. I'd wager it was an inside job. A human job."

"That would have to be a ridiculously clever human," Martha commented.

By then, Colonel Compton and the two physicists had joined them.

Compton pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and said, "I'll put my best men on it."

"Er…" the Doctor said, a split second before Compton looked at his phone's screen and realised that the same Rehengese text was scrolling across it, as well.

"I think you'll find that land lines are still in operation at this stage, but computers and mobile phones will be uncooperative," said the Doctor. "And don't count on those land lines lasting too much longer."

Diane Wesson stood up. "Colonel, you can use the phone in my mother's house," she said. "Come on." And the two of them made to leave.

"Don't forget to use the garage door to go in and out!" the Doctor reminded them, though they did not answer.

* * *

The Doctor endured about ten minutes of Q&A from the UNIT officers surrounding him, most of them wanting to know how the hell anyone could get to the bottom of who had caused the five-minute firewall gap, if all of the computers in the world were out-of-commission. The Doctor responded mostly with variations on, "Let's see what Colonel Compton can find out," and "My computer in the TARDIS might be able to help."

Martha, Fortis and Enger, however, stood in the corner and conferred only with each other.

"Can the TARDIS really do that? Override whatever's got into the computers on this planet, and use normal channels and whatnot?" asked Enger.

"If the Doctor says it can, then it can," Martha said. "The TARDIS doesn't need firewalls anyhow, because it's sentient. I reckon it could fight off a frontal attack like that, with its own… fortitude? Intellectual prowess? Whatever you call it when a machine has a brain and a heart. That is, if the Rehengese even have any clue that the Doctor or the TARDIS are here, and/or have the technology or wherewithal to try and infiltrate something as complicated and advanced as the TARDIS."

"Which would be highly unlikely," Fortis said. "The odds of some trashy alien race able to work out and unravel Time Lord technology? Astronomical. And it's not like it's even some device forged by one Time Lord, like the one I was contending with a couple of weeks ago. The TARDISes came from the heart of their civilisation. They were wrought in the citadels using the collective instincts of the Time Lord councils, and blah blah blah. I would wager that the TARDIS is untouched."

With this little monologue, Martha was reminded that Larry Fortis was a die-hard Doctor fan, even _with_ the recent threat to his person and his planet. And, even discounting Larry's recent foray into bizarre Time Lord technology and the impossibility of it, he had done his homework.

That's when the Colonel and Diane re-entered the truck, and all voices quieted in anticipation of his news. The fact that he looked vexed in the extreme was not lost on the Doctor, nor on Martha.

"As it turns out," he announced. "The NSA and MI6 both saw the cyber-attack coming before it occurred, and were able to team up and trace the source before their computers went down. They don't know anything about the alien threat, but the origin point of the firewall demolition is here in Denver. Or rather, one of the suburbs. The local PD is securing the area, and the National Guard is bringing him in."

"The National Guard?" asked an officer.

"There's an Air National Guard base about ten miles east of here, very near the origin point. This really isn't UNIT business, is it?"

A low din filled the room as UNIT officers began to titter about this news.

"Wait, the origin point of the firewall breach is here? In Denver, Colorado?" asked the Doctor, whose voice rose above everyone else's. "Today. 12th September, 2008."

"Yes, you heard me right, Doctor," said Compton, before turning away to speak to officers who now had a million questions for him.

The Doctor looked at Martha with a deep frown.

"Are you thinking that it's a _remarkable_ coincidence that we're called to Denver for a ginormous time anomaly, and then in the same city, on the same day, some cyber-terrorist takes down all the firewalls on Earth and ushers in an alien invasion?" she asked.

"No, I'm not thinking it's any kind of coincidence," he answered.

* * *

The Doctor had insisted upon his and Martha's being there when the cyber-terrorist was arrested. Colonel Compton got the two of them clearance with the National Guard, and the three of them rode east for fifteen minutes, in a UNIT-issue Jeep, out to the suburb of Aurora.

The entire subdivision was on lockdown, per police personnel, but when the UNIT Jeep arrived, it was ushered through. The house looked innocuous enough; it was a split-level, white with blue trim. The lawn looked as though it hadn't been mown in a while, but other than that, it was exactly like any other house in a million different neighbourhoods across the country.

Colonel Compton, Martha and the Doctor exited the vehicle, only to find the front door already ajar.

"Oh blimey," the Doctor sighed. "They've already gone in, guns a-blazin'."

"The U.S. military doesn't pull any punches with terrorism, Doctor," said Compton, quite earnestly.

The Doctor didn't answer, he just stood at the kerb beside the Colonel and Martha, hands in pockets, pained, grave expression on his face, waiting for the perpetrator to be guided out of the house.

"I'll need to talk to him," the Doctor said.

"I'll do what I can, Doctor, but these guys are über careful with terrorism suspects."

"Terrorism," the Doctor snorted. "I'll bet you dollars against doughnuts that this guy is just some hapless geek who lives in his mum's basement."

As if on cue, a lady whom Martha would have placed in her sixties, exited the house in hysterics, guided by a National Guardsman.

"What is all this?" she asked, her voice quavering. "What is happening? What are you doing to my son?"

"Ma'am, your son is responsible for a worldwide cyber-attack," the officer said to her.

"A world-wa… excuse me?"

"Firewalls all over the planet have gone down, and your son's IP address has been identified by two global intelligence and security agencies, as the point of origin."

"I don't understand anything that you're saying," said the woman. "All I know is that if my son has done something wrong, he needs a doctor, not an army."

The Doctor and Martha looked at each other momentarily, then both stepped forward toward the woman. "Right you are," said the Doctor. "Hello, Mrs…?"

"It's Miss. Never been married, thank you very much," she said, defensively, with her nose in the air. She had the manner of someone who had been judged a few too many times for this fact. "And the name is Hargreaves. Janet Hargreaves."

"Miss Hargreaves, I'm the Doctor, I work for UNIT in London, and this is my colleague, Dr. Jones. We're here to help."

"Excuse me, you can't just…" began the officer escorting Miss Hargreaves.

Colonel Compton sidled up behind the Doctor and showed his credentials to the National Guardsman. "We're UNIT. We've been cleared. You'd do well to stand down."

"It's all right, we won't let her get too far," the Doctor assured the officer. The Guardsman removed his hands from the lady's arm, and stepped aside.

Martha took her arm then, gently, and suggested she might like to have a seat in the Jeep. She accepted.

She took a few deep breaths and seem to relax a little, under the care of two who claimed to be doctors, and not officers. In addition, Martha happened to be the only other woman in the vicinity.

"Who are you again?" she asked.

"We work for UNIT, which is a military agency of sorts," the Doctor told her. "It's a collective effort, with HQs on four continents, including this one. We just happen to be from the London office. Now…"

"…you said that your son needs a doctor, not an army," Martha interrupted. "Why is that?"

"Because it's true!" she exclaimed. "My son is special."

"Special how?"

"Well, I've never really known," she admitted, wringing her hands. "He's a genius, make no mistake, but… maybe a genius with a few screws loose. Goodness, that sounds awful to say about my own son."

"No, it doesn't," the Doctor said. "It tells us a lot. Go on."

"He's almost frighteningly intelligent – could solve mathematical problems that even his professors couldn't do. But when you try to talk to him, it's like…" she shrugged. "Talking to a brick wall. Or a cartoon character. He's what they might have called an Idiot Savant back in my day, but I guess that's not very P.C. now."

"These days they might call him an individual with autism," Martha suggested. "Sounds like Asperger's. High level of intelligence and mathematical or technical proficiency, but low levels of communicability and social interaction? Does that sound familiar?"

"That's my Barry," said Miss Hargreaves.

"Miss Hargreaves," the Doctor said. "Do you think that Barry is capable of understanding what he's done?"

"Oh, well, I would doubt it," she said. "He noodles around on his computer all the time, and I've joked that I swear he's launching the space shuttle from our basement. But as far as actually _accomplishing_ anything, let alone something like… what are they saying he did?"

"He's let down all the firewalls for all the computers on Earth."

"What is a firewall?"

"It's a kind of defence system for a computer," the Doctor attempted to explain. "Just about every computer, or group of computers, has them. It's basically a program that will repel other programs that aren't allowed in, like viruses or malware. They are, by their nature, hard to tear down, but there are those who can, and they're called hackers. Run-of-the-mill hackers can do it, and it doesn't take much. However, to tear down all of them at once… your son must have burrowed to the very foundation code of all firewalls, to the very _concept_ of a firewall, and somehow, figuratively, worked out how to replicate its DNA and launch it across the Earth…"

"Doctor," Martha whispered. She shook her head subtly at him.

Miss Hargreaves chuckled. "I still don't know what you're talking about… but you _are_ talking on a global scale. And I can guarantee you, my Barry has no designs on worldwide anything. He barely knows there _is_ a world."

"And you live here with your son?" asked Martha. "This is your house?"

"Yes."

"It's just the two of you?"

"Yes," admitted Miss Hargreaves. "It's always been that way. Barry's never known his father."

The Doctor wondered, "Is this the house that Barry grew up in?"

"We've been here about twenty years," she said. "So no. We started out in a neighbourhood over by Fairmount Cemetery, and then for a while, we lived in Texas – went there for a job…"

"What do you do for a living?" asked Martha.

"I was in sales. Sold Mary-Kay products for years. Did those parties during the day, about two or three times a week, with all the married ladies..." she said. "Then we went to Texas so I could have a desk job with the company, coordinating salespeople. It was more regular hours, so I could be there for my son. Especially since he was... you know... not the sort who could ever be left alone or really cared-for by anyone else."

"Of course," the Doctor lulled.

"Now I'm retired. Anyway, we moved back here in the late 80's," she said, with finality. Then, she paused for a moment and asked, "Sorry, why is any of this relevant?"

"Oh, you know, just… investigative stuff," the Doctor said affably.

He looked at Martha meaningfully. She did not understand.

Just then, they heard a cry. A deep, throaty cry, coming from the house.

"Barry!" Miss Hargreaves called out, standing up.

A balding man in a black _Star Wars_ tee shirt and a red pyjama bottoms was being led from the home. "You're hurting me!" he was saying.

Martha put her hands on the mother's shoulders and urged her to sit, otherwise the military men would hold her back, with force if necessary. The Doctor approached the clueless prisoner.

"Barrett Hargreaves," a National Guardsman was saying. "Age forty. Five-foot-ten, one hundred and eighty-two pounds. No spouse, no children. No driver's licence, and no job, but he does hold a doctorate from The School of Mines. No history of cyber-terrorism or any other known criminal activity."

"Hello there, Barry, I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor, taking the man's hand and shaking it.

Barry pulled his hand away, and said, "I don't shake hands."

"All right then, I understand. I apologise," the Doctor said gently. Of an officer he asked, "Can you find some Purell for the man?"

The officer muttered something, and scurried away.

Barry attempted to wipe his hands on his pyjama bottoms.

"Do you understand why you're being arrested?" the Doctor asked.

The suspect spoke evenly, calmly, though he kept his eyes firmly on the first button of the Doctor's pin-striped jacket, and not on his face or eyes. "Yes. I was trying to hack into the Skywalker Ranch database, because…" He stopped speaking and hesitated. He took a few deep breaths, as if gathering courage. His eyes, with effort, then drifted up to the Doctor's. The Doctor smiled, though did not probe the man any further. "You look slippery. I don't know if I should tell you."

"Oh, it's all right, you can trust me!" the Doctor assured him. "These guys aren't listening, are you, boys? And anyway, they were just leaving."

The officers guarding the prisoner looked at the Doctor with disbelief, but Colonel Compton stepped forward. "Men, the perimeter is secure. The Doctor is a high-ranking military official. What are you afraid of? You heard the man… step away."

Martha appeared at his side with a small bottle of Purell she'd found in the Jeep. Barry held out his hands, and Martha squeezed a few drops on his callused palms, and the relief on his face was palpable.

The Doctor assured him that Martha had been assigned as his official UNIT co-investigative partner, and could be trusted because they'd both taken an oath. He reminded Barry that they were both professionals, and there was such a thing as patient/doctor confidentiality. The legality of it seemed to satisfy the man, and from there, Barry Hargreaves went into detail about how and why exactly he had infiltrated the database of Skywalker Ranch. He detailed for the Doctor the incredibly aggressive code he had launched in order to get past their firewalls. The Doctor's face registered alarm when Barry described the code, and Martha interpreted this as recognition: yes, that would bring the entire cyber-world to its knees.

The Doctor then explained to him that that code had spread throughout the world and caused a five-minute security breach in every computer on the planet. Barry's face was impassive and his eyes were fixed back on the Doctor's top button, when he said, "Really?"

"Yes," said the Doctor. "And the breach has allowed an alien species to infiltrate this planet's technology, and in the next ninety-six hours or so, they will attempt a hostile takeover of the human race."

"Oh."

"How does that make you feel?"

"Well, kinda bad, I think."

* * *

They loaded Barry and Janet Hargreaves into separate vehicles and drove them to God-Knew-Where. At Martha's request, Colonel Compton had received a guarantee from the National Guard that mother and son would be reunited sometime tonight.

By now, the sun was starting to set, and on the ride back to Lillian Handler's house, the Doctor and Martha debriefed on Barry Hargreaves' case.

"There's no way that guy understood the scale of what he was doing," Martha assessed.

"Agreed," said the Doctor. "His mum's right. He needs treatment, not jail. You know what I was thinking? Maybe we could get him in to see Dr. Paulsen. He's certainly got the intelligence capacity for her programme – he could wind up being a real feather in her cap."

"Who's Dr. Paulsen?" Martha asked.

"Dr. Olivia Paulsen," he said.

There was a long, pregnant silence, and then Martha said, "You say that as though I'm supposed to know who that is."

"Oh, come on! You're a doctor! She's legendary! Colonel Compton, you've heard of her, right?"

"Sorry, no," he grumbled from the driver's seat.

"Seriously? She's famous! She works out of this super-posh facility in San Diego, which she built up from a one-thousand-square foot clinic. She's made incredible strides in the field of autism research. Her work has been pivotal in identifying the genes, the external factors involved (and for the record, vaccines have absolutely nothing to do with it). In the next few years, she will develop treatments and drugs that will literally revolutionise half of the mental-health field, and she will turn out barely-communicative autism patients who are totally productive, and who have completely surmounted their usual… you know, autism issues. They get over their social anxiety, their non-communicative behaviour, their lack of humour – all of it."

"Sounds amazing," Martha said. "But I've never heard of her."

"I find that hard to believe," he muttered. "Her work allows autism patients like Barry to have a normal life. Not normal – extraordinary. They no longer have to live in basements and be quiet geniuses because they can't hold jobs. She helps them channel their genius! She'll have patients who make advancements in space travel, mag-lev technology, interdimensional reactive technology, aerospace engineering. For the next couple centuries, Martha, her legacy project turns out these people who contribute enormous things to the human race because her programme helps them function at a higher level than they otherwise could have!"

"Wow, okay!" she said, chuckling now at his enthusiasm. "I believe you. I suppose we should make an effort to get into touch with this Dr. Paulsen, and see if her programme has room for Barry Hargreaves."

"I just can't work out why you haven't heard of her," he whined. "Are we too early? 2008? Well, no…"

Just then, they took a left turn, and passed a long, six-foot-high curved wall with large black lettering that said, _Fairmount Cemetery and Mortuary_.

"Oh, isn't that where Miss Hargreaves said she and Barry started out? In a neighbourhood right around here?" asked Martha.

"Yep," the Doctor said, clipping his syllable.

Within thirty seconds, they had arrived at the Handler house, and Martha was beginning to understand the meaningful look the Doctor had given her when Miss Hargreaves had dropped this particular tidbit of information.

Colonel Compton climbed out of the Jeep. When they were alone, she said, "You noticed the Fairmount sign when we drove out to arrest Barry, didn't you?"

"Yeah."

"The Hargreaves used to live in this neighbourhood."

"Yes, they did."

"So, time anomaly, cyber-attack of sorts, both on the same day, with connections to the same neighbourhood?"

"Mm-hm. What do you make of it?"

"I have no bloody idea. You?"

"Same," said the Doctor.

* * *

 **Hope you're having fun with this story! Don't forget the part where you leave a review! ;-)**


	6. Chapter 6

**Again, I don't know much about computers. There are many, many things I am willing to research so that I don't sound daft when I'm writing about them, but computers are not one of those things. I figure, half of what I'm writing is implausible alien stuff anyhow, so if we consider this, then it might stand to reason that my computer talk is gibberish. ;-) Or something.**

* * *

VI

Diane Wesson locked up her mother's house and went home to tend to the lady herself. She promised to come back the following morning to open it up again. She was reluctant to entrust the keys and/or garage door opener to Colonel Compton or the Doctor.

It was almost eight p.m., Mountain Standard Time, and the Doctor reckoned it was a good time to put this weird day to rest.

"I'll get started on a code that we can launch back at the Rehengese," he told Colonel Compton.

"What about the firewalls?" asked Compton.

"They're already back up, I should think," said the Doctor. "They were only down for five minutes. It's just that by the time they went back up, the infiltration had already occurred. They can't fight off a virus once it's in… Earth-based firewalls would only keep them out."

"Can you programme, like, antibodies?" Martha asked him.

"Good metaphor, Dr. Jones," he said with a smile. "I'll set the TARDIS on it."

* * *

The TARDIS was parked in Lillian's backyard where they'd left her, and the Doctor didn't see any point in moving. Upon entering, the Doctor immediately set about programming the vessel's equipment to do as he promised. Martha showered and attempted to unwind, and an hour later, returned to the console room in her bathrobe, with two glasses of wine.

"How are things going?"

"Pretty well," he said, still staring at the console's computer screen. "I think we'll have to launch the code by Sunday morning in order to thwart this thing before it works out how to take down the first electrical grid."

"You can do that, right?"

"Yep," he said, his hands flying over the mad Gallifreyan keyboard. "In addition, I asked the TARDIS to run a scan. As I suspected, you and I, and the UNIT folks and Diane… we are _not_ on a time loop. Only the 1960's side is on a loop."

"Well, that's a relief. I think."

"It most definitely is. Having both sides of the time-overlap on a loop makes everything a right sight more complicated, not to mention impossible to deal with, considering all knowledge starts over when the time loop starts over." He shuddered. "Makes me a little queasy just thinking about it."

"No offence," she said, after a beat. "But I'm really glad I'm not you right now."

"You should be. Trust me, it's no picnic," he agreed. He flipped a few more switches and toggles, then he said, "Anyway, it'll take a day or two to get the antidote code, or whatever you want to call it, completely spelled out, and then translated to a format that UNIT can launch from a truck parked on a residential street in Denver, especially with some of their equipment down."

"You're not going to launch it yourself?"

"I don't want them knowing that the TARDIS is the origin point. You know what might happen then, insidious little buggers."

"Yeah." She sidled up close and handed him a glass of wine, which he took. He also leaned in for a kiss. She sighed in response, then asked, "Can you come sit with me for a while?"

"Why don't _you_ sit with _me?_ " he asked, taking a sip.

She gave a reluctant smile. "Okay, fair enough." She sat down on the single seat in the room, and folded up her legs underneath her, adjusting her robe modestly. "So, what's the plan for tomorrow?"

"Well, the TARDIS is doing its thing," he said, leaning against the console momentarily, and taking another sip. "And soon enough, I'll be able to give Larry a USB drive that will repair their operating systems _and_ repel the Rehengese. That's a very UNIT thing to do. But you and I… we'll have to investigate Lillian's house a bit more. No one probes a time anomaly like a Time Lord. And his Companion."

"It seems to be all related anyway," she said.

"Yeah," he mused. "Weird, isn't it? The time-overlap and the cyber-attack on the same day, and Hargreaves having lived in this same neighbourhood…"

"So, UNIT can get on the cyber thing, even if it's really _you_ getting on the cyber thing, and you and I can get on the time thing."

He nodded. "I think we will need to be in the house at noon tomorrow, to see if George McPhail drops by."

"Reckon he will?"

"I do," he said. "We basically know he's on a two-day cycle. We posit that on day one, they have a good shag, and on day two, he comes round looking for her. You saw them in bed together today, so if I'm right, he'll come a-knockin' tomorrow."

"What will we say to him?"

"I dunno," he shrugged. "Maybe just that Lillan's not there. Maybe we'll try telling him that _you're_ Lillian. Or that I am. Who knows? Maybe he'll be so stuck on a loop, he won't notice."

"Yikes. Sounds risky."

"I'm the Doctor. Risky's my middle name."

"What if he tries to kiss you?" she asked with a smirk.

"You underestimate me, Martha Jones," he replied.

"Experienced at snogging postmen, are you?"

"Nine hundred years is a long, long life," he told her, now also smirking.

"I'll have some of those stories off you someday," she laughed.

"Someday. But for tomorrow, mostly, I want to observe the phenomenon. What happens when George McPhail comes to call? What details did Lillian and Diane miss when they saw him, because they didn't know what to look for or were too startled to see anything objectively? What happens when 1965 (or whatever year it is) knocks on the door of 2008? What happens when his life intersects with this time?"

"What happens when his arrival makes you sick and you vomit into his mail bag?"

"We'll cross that bridge then, I suppose," he sighed, knowing that it was a possibility. "Maybe I'll just avoid eating breakfast."

* * *

In a couple of hours, the Doctor and the TARDIS together had worked out the codes to the point where the TARDIS could run on her own for a while, and the Time Lord could retire for the evening with his lovely Companion. Over the course of the day's events, he had almost forgotten about the life that they now shared. But now, they had shut out the bizarre story happening in the so-not-bizarre suburb outside, and they were eager to be together, and be totally in love.

Something about this case was gnawing at them, but for different reasons, and in different ways. The Doctor, of course, was bothered by the behaviour of time itself, within and around the Handler house. It wasn't just an overlap… there was something he was missing. Like a hole in his brain, that just needed more pieces of a puzzle to be filled. He knew that the more they learned about this neighbourhood and its players, the more otherworldly, Time-Lordy truth would begin to worm its way into his brain. But as of yet, he could not see it.

But Martha had been feeling a bit sorry for George McPhail. Even though she knew that this was not a "haunting" as they knew it, she couldn't help but feel that his story resembled that of a man who was unable to let go, who had _unfinished business_ as it were. His despondency, and the way he seemed to keep coming back… it touched her heart. She hoped they could find a way to resolve the anomaly soon, for his sake.

And because this phenomenon was affecting her in such a way, she wanted nothing more than to be near her own love, and be thankful that things had turned out the way they had. She reckoned it could just as easily have been _her_ on a time loop, knocking on the same door every two days, looking for someone who considered her as less than an object of love. In fact, she had often felt that she _was_ on a time loop when travelling that first year in the TARDIS. Day after day, the same avoidance, the same ghosts in his eyes, the same thing, for some reason, compelling her back toward him…

But that was she no longer. She had had the wherewithal to leave, and to find someone new. And even if that whole "someone new" situation had been a farce, she had found her own footing. She had found a sort of post-Doctor equilibrium. Good thing, too, because when he came calling a few months down the road and wanted her to reconsider him in the old light, she might have wondered if her soul had come running just because it didn't know how not to. But as it was, she knew she loved him. She knew she was on solid ground and that she was, indeed, lucky.

She hadn't realised how tired she was, and the wine wasn't helping her stay awake. No more than ten minutes after retiring to the media room to watch something mindless on the TV before bed, she was asleep against the Doctor's chest. He'd been talking to her for several minutes, when he finally looked down and saw why it was that she wasn't answering. He smirked, chuckled, then woke her so that they could drag themselves to bed.

* * *

The Doctor and Martha spent the following morning in the UNIT truck trying, with Larry Fortis' help, to explain to various officers how the launching of code would work.

"Thing is," the Doctor said. "It has to be not only tough, but also stealthy somehow. Which is tricky. Because, if they see it coming, they'll launch their own attack on it. Their technology… it's sneaky. I don't want to say that it can outthink me, but… well, it wouldn't be the first time a computer's got the jump on me. I'm not taking any chances."

"What's the plan from here?" asked Compton.

The Doctor explained that he and Martha would be in the house at the appointed time of the postman's visit. When umpteen different UNIT personnel suggested that they should all be there with their instruments, Fortis asked, "Do any of you think your instruments can tell us something about a time anomaly that a Time Lord can't?" They all grumbled and grudgingly agreed.

And so, just before noon that Saturday, Diane opened up the house to the Doctor and Martha, put a German chocolate cake in the fridge, which Lillian had made for the UNIT "guys," and then went back home to be with her mother. Although, before leaving, she stepped into the house briefly with them, and asked, "Is there anything you're not telling me?"

"Why would you say that?" the Doctor asked, his brow displaying confusion.

"Because you sent me out of the room yesterday, right after… well, asking me if there was anything _I_ wasn't telling _you_. That tells me that you've got something, and it has to do with the history of this house or my family. Otherwise, why would you think I'd know?"

The Doctor considered her, while Martha watched a bit nervously. He had developed a great deal of finesse, just in the time she had known him. But sometimes, he still gave himself away, and/or could be a clod. And Diane Wesson was no dummy.

"Diane, we do have something," the Doctor said, with clear compassion in his voice. "But we can't disclose it right now. It has been classified as a sensitive piece of evidence in an official UNIT investigation. I'm sorry."

Diane sighed. "I thought as much. Whatever. Help yourselves to cake." And she left through the garage, without looking back or saying a proper goodbye.

"Do you think she knows?" asked Martha.

"That her mum was canoodling the postman?" The Doctor's features distorted for a few moments. "Hard to say. I'd bet not, though."

Martha sighed. "Why don't we just tell her?"

"Martha," he whined. "That kind of information can be hard to take. How would you like to find out from a bunch of strangers that one of your parents was unfaithful?"

"I did find out… from _the other woman_. Who, at the time, was a stranger. I handled it just fine. Well, fine-ish. Considering."

"Wait, what? _How_ did you find out?"

Martha sighed again, and spoke quickly. "Annalise and my dad had identical phones. It has since been explained to me that in the haste of trying to get him back into his clothes and out of _her_ house in time to get home to my mother, so as not to be suspected of doing exactly what he was doing, they got their phones switched."

"Lovely. And you needed that explained to you, why?"

"That's what I said! Anyway, that evening I happened to call his phone, Annalise answered it, there was an awkward conversation…" She scrunched up her nose. "Not a happy memory, if you don't mind."

"Sorry," he muttered. He wandered over to the windows and opened the curtains halfway, confirming again that each window showed a different time period. Through the one on the right, the UNIT truck was clearly visible, along with the red geraniums and the evidence of long years of wear upon the Ford Fairlane across the street. Through the one on the left, there was no truck, there were purple flowers and a brand-new Ford. There was also a woman in a sun-shielding scarf and cat-eye sunglasses next door, trimming the roses.

He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and rode out a wave of nausea. Then, he continued talking. "Anyway, we know next to nothing about Diane's disposition or constitution, or even her belief system. What if she… I dunno, has a cardiac event, or goes home and starts harassing her mother?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Martha saw movement coming through the window on the left. She turned to look. "Oh, boy," she muttered. "Incoming."

They peered through the glass and spied the postman, talking to the lady next door. She had tossed aside her rose clippers and had removed her sunglasses, and was batting her eyelashes at him, and it was evident that the postman didn't hate the attention.

"Seems like old Mr. McPhail is a bit of a lad," the Doctor whispered.

"I think we already knew that."

"But look. Here's another one, right next door."

Martha looked at the Doctor. "Do you think he's shagging her too?"

"How should I know? Though, if he is, why isn't he going into the house right about now?"

"Maybe it's not her day," Martha suggested. "Has he got a schedule?"

"Maybe we need to find out. Love has been known to move planets, and so has jealousy."

"Damn it," she hissed.

"What?"

"In the first place, I don't understand why some people just can't keep their clothes on."

"Yes you do."

"Okay, yes, I do. But in the second place… does this completely blow open our theory that _love_ is at the centre of this? George McPhail and his impossible love for a bored housewife who was only using him?"

"Not necessarily."

They could not hear what McPhail was saying, but he was smiling a wide, affable smile and the woman smacked him playfully on the shoulder as though he had paid her an exaggerated compliment. The flirtation went on for several minutes, McPhail's good looks and easy manner putting the woman completely off-balance.

"Blimey, he knows the power of his own charm," the Doctor commented.

"Pot calling the kettle black," she muttered back at him.

They made brief eye-contact, and both smiled slyly, before turning their attention back to the neighbour's front lawn.

Eventually, they saw the postman reach into his bag and remove a few letters, handing them over to the rose-trimming lady.

The woman picked up her clippers and took her mail into the house with her, waving goodbye to George McPhail. He then turned and faced the Handler house with a completely different demeanour. He fixed his eyes upon the front door and frowned at it. Both the Doctor and Martha took a step back, fearful that he would see them. Come to that, the Doctor hadn't yet bothered to wonder what would happen when one looked through the windows from the 1960's side…

Still scowling, McPhail reached into his mail bag and extracted a package. It was about the size and shape of a shirt box, wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string . Diane Wesson's account of what she had seen had included a package in the postman's hands, which he had set aside, in order to help catch her when she nearly fainted. But she had not specified the size nor shape of the parcel, and obviously she could not know whom it was from, or what was inside.

The postman seemed to steel himself, and then walk forward. He turned right at the path leading up to the Handler house's front door. Within five seconds, the Doctor and Martha heard a knock.

"Eleven minutes past noon," he whispered, before steadying himself on the sofa's arm, against another nauseated attack.

Martha opened the door.

"Oh, hello, ma'am," McPhail said, with a bit of a surprised expression. "I've got a package for Mrs. Handler. Is she here?"

"No, I'm sorry, she's not," Martha replied.

"It's all right, I'll try again tomorrow," said the postman.

The Doctor joined Martha at the door, but he looked pale, and had to steady himself upon the doorjamb. He took a nausea-suppressing swallow, before speaking.

"Hi, there," he said.

McPhail's eyes narrowed. "Who are you?"

"Me? Oh, I'm… I'm Lillian's cousin. From England. Smith is my name. John Smith. I'm staying here for the week."

"She didn't mention that anyone would be staying," McPhail said suspiciously.

"Well, that's no surprise. Why would she announce her family's plans to the postman, eh?" asked the Doctor, attempting a friendly chuckle.

The postman's gaze slid to his right, back onto Martha's face. "And who are you?"

"Well, who _would_ I be? The cleaner of course," she answered, cringing inside.

"The cleaner. Also from England?"

"She's with me," the Doctor said lightly. He then held out his hand. "Anyway, why don't you give me the package and I'll pass it along to Lillian when she gets home."

"Where is she?" asked McPhail, flatly.

"Erm, I'm not sure," said the Doctor. "She didn't say where she was going, she just, you know… left. A while ago. But it's fine. Just give me the package, and I'll make sure she gets it."

When he held out his hand this time, the Doctor's eyes fell almost involuntarily upon the package itself. He gave it a few seconds' scrutiny, and a horrible truth sparked into being.

That was when the nausea became too much. He turned and ran toward the doorway leading to the hallway, bedrooms and washroom. Martha and the postman then heard him retching violently, followed by the toilet flushing.

McPhail's eyes were open wide. "Good grief," he said. "Is he all right?"

"It's probably just jetlag," Martha said lamely. "So… the package?"

He considered her outstretched hand for a second, then he said, "No, I'll just try again tomorrow. Postal protocol and all. Sorry about Mrs. Handler's… _cousin_. Hope he feels better soon."

He carefully placed the package back into his mail bag, saluted Martha with a tip of his hat, and turned to walk away. She shut the door, and then moved to the left, to look through the 1960's window. Weirdly, she could no longer see George McPhail. She wondered where he would go, and what he would do next, but he seemed to have disappeared. She tried the right-hand window, but of course, all she could see was a UNIT truck and other things occurring on Niagara Street in 2008.

Meanwhile, she heard the Doctor retch once more, then she heard the water running in the sink, and the sound of him rinsing and spitting.

She approached the washroom door and knocked. "He's gone. He disappeared."

"What do you mean, disappeared?" the Doctor asked, through the door.

"I mean, I shut the door, and then tried to watch him through the left-side window, but he wasn't there."

The Doctor groaned, and cursed.

"Jesus. Are you all right?"

"No," he croaked.

"Do you need anything? I can check your special medicine cabinet in the TARDIS for…"

He interrupted her by opening the door.

"Did you notice anything weird about that package he tried to deliver?" he asked.

* * *

 **Hope you enjoyed this installment! How about leaving a review now? It would make my day!**


	7. Chapter 7

VII

It was one of those times when she felt adrift. Back in the old days, she thought that this feeling occurred because she _was_ adrift from him. Because he didn't love her, but she loved him. Because he was pointedly not letting her into his soul, his mind, his inner life.

But now she understood that that had been rather a simplistic and immature way of looking at things. She felt adrift from him because _he_ was adrift from everything else.

Because he was so clever, so dynamic, so tortured, so alone.

Because he was a Time Lord. And though she could intellectually ruminate over what that meant (sort of), if never fully understand it, no part of her physical being was attuned to the Time Lord's lot. Except of course, the part of her physical being that was attuned just to _him_ , but that was a different phenomenon altogether.

Though, she had got a chill when he'd uttered that sequence of four words…

"Are you certain?" Martha asked, her voice nearly breaking.

She, of course, had no gut-level sense of what a "fixed point in time" meant, but she had heard the Doctor discuss it enough to know the colossal impact a moment like that could and would have upon the universe. She knew his guts must be churning something terrible, and when he hurt, she hurt.

He nodded, and stared off into the blue sky.

They were sitting on the back step of the Handler house, leaning against the door. They had decided to take a momentary pause in the cool backyard while the Doctor got hold of his stomach.

"A fixed point…" he commented. "All pivoting around that parcel. One little box, not even the size of your average sofa cushion, that contains everything to derail life as we know it in the universe… eventually. Or life as we _had_ known it. Or life as we _could_ know it, or as _is possible_ toknow it, or… _o, Life, that we might know thee_. I'm not sure how to even express it. In subjunctive, perhaps? Past subjunctive or imperfect?"

"Doctor?" she asked, trying to stop him rambling.

"It's a good thing I'm not doing this in Spanish."

"Doctor," she repeated, slightly more sternly. "What's in the package?"

"That's something we're going to need to find out."

"You don't know? I thought…"

"I don't actually know what's inside, Martha," he scolded. "I can just tell that it will cause chaos. When I looked at it. Or when I reached out and tried to touch it, maybe. When I got close to it, I knew. It's what made me ill. It's what let me know that we're dealing with a fixed point."

She sighed. "Great. Another thing I can't help with."

"Don't say that," he lulled, and put an arm around her and she settled her head against his shoulder and chest. He spoke to her softly, a bit resignedly, and the tone made her feel much less distant from him. "I know this all must seem so intangible and nebulous to you, but for me, it's very concrete. Little by little, things come to light and when enough of the pieces fall into place, and/or I receive a big slap in the forehead from a time-pivotal artefact like that package… well, I just know."

"So the whole deal with that package… it's all in your Time Lord senses."

"Well, not all. Like the fact that it had no name, no address, no postage and no return address on it. I noticed that, just with my old-fashioned eyes, momentarily before I had to… you know, excuse myself."

"What?" she asked, turning to face him. "Are you sure? There had to be something on the package. A postman doesn't literally deliver something in a _plain_ brown wrapper!"

"Would I say it if I weren't sure? There was _nothing_ written on it, or stuck to it, Martha. Mark my words."

"Okay, so the package was coming from McPhail himself."

"That's what I think."

"So what's next?"

"I think we need to do some skulking. I think we need to find out more about _the other day_."

"The first day of the cycle? The day of the great shagging caper?" she asked with a bit of a smile.

"Yep," he said. "Which gives us twenty-four hours to work on writing a Rehengese-repelling code. And to dig up two portable perception filters."

* * *

Martha and the Doctor had a lovely afternoon strolling in a nearby upscale shopping district that Diane had recommended. They saw just about every type of art in every type of pretentious gallery, and every type of geegaw in myriad different useless-trinkets shops. They did enjoy a rare music shop, and their late, bizarre Tapas lunch, though they skipped the men's fashion stores, the bridal boutiques and the Antoine du Chez salon and spa.

They returned that evening to the TARDIS and discovered that she had analysed the Rehengese infiltration codes and had designed a counter-attack. The Doctor realised that she had not yet translated said attack to a USB-friendly format that their UNIT friends could mount, so she set about doing that.

Meanwhile, the Time Lord and his Companion searched through the front-wing storage room for two keys to the TARDIS that had once hung round their necks when they were trying to duck the Master. Captain Jack had had one as well, but he had walked away with his when he returned to his base in Cardiff after that particular year-long adventure.

Stumbling through the debris, some of which was scattered on the floor, and gazing hard at the shelves, Martha mused, "I wonder how Jack is doing. You know, I should have thought to call him a week and a half ago or so."

"To wrangle me under control?" asked the Doctor.

"Yeah."

"Nah," he dismissed. "You did a fine job on your own. I wouldn't have given up my _freedom_ for Jack."

"But he would have _so_ enjoyed the wrangling," she chuckled.

"He would just have enjoyed _saying_ the word _wrangling_."

The Doctor moved some bric-a-brac out of the way, searching the tiers of rubbish for two pieces of metal and two strings that might as well have been needles in haystacks. To boot, they were cloaked from being seen. Even though they were looking for the keys, these particular keys would still be harder to find than the average key.

"Let's just go back to the console and make new ones," he said despairing at all the detritus laying about.

She sighed. "Okay."

"But now that we have the actual TARDIS to work with, unlike before, we don't need a 'part of her' as it were. We can use whatever. So…"

He reached up on the shelf and grabbed two lug nuts. Then he crossed the room and extracted a spool of yellow yarn from a drawer.

He then led Martha back to their normal base-of-operations, and set about programming the sonic screwdriver. He planned on using a small, quite superficial, bit of the TARDIS' internal energies to create a new pair of perception filters for them to wear around their necks.

"We can ramp them up," he said. "So unless George and Lillian already know we're there, and really squint in order to see us, they won't have any clue we're in the house."

"And watching them in their most intimate moments."

"Well, yeah. But, did you hear them speak? Did they say any actual _words_ when you saw them before?"

"Just the usual," she said, a bit sheepishly. " _Yes, yes, yes, oh God,_ stuff like that. And of course, the moaning. But nothing particularly revelatory."

"If they're not going to communicate much while they're making love, then I just want to see what happens afterwards," he told her. Then, his attentions seemed to turn inward. He leaned against the railing that circled the console, and spoke mostly, at this point, to himself. "Something _has_ to have happened. I know it, otherwise, why would that little episode be part of the sequence stuck on the loop? Why would the day before a fixed point be pinned down as an event that bears repeating, if something provocative didn't occur?"

"You're asking questions that I cannot answer," Martha told him. But she didn't really think he heard her.

* * *

The perception filters were ready within the hour, and the Doctor removed them from the little metal platform upon which they'd been incubating.

"Lovely," the Doctor said, taking one for himself and giving one to Martha. "Our own brand of invisibility cloak."

"Heh," she chortled, almost bitterly. "Maybe we could use them to break Barry Hargreaves out of jail."

"What would we do with him then?" he asked, rather absently. Then, an idea occurred to him. "You know what? I'm going to look up Dr. Paulsen."

"What?" Martha asked, a bit jarred by this seemingly random topic… and the fact that she didn't know who Dr. Paulsen was.

"That psychiatrist I told you about," he said, typing commands into the TARDIS' database. "I'll bet that once you start reading, you'll recognise her. Like I said, I find it very hard to believe that a brilliant doctor such as yourself would not have heard of Olivia Paulsen."

"Well," she said, plopping down on the seat. "Psychiatry was not my specialisation."

"It wouldn't need to be," he muttered, typing away. Then, his voice piped up again. "If we can get Dr. Paulsen involved, and see if she'll take him on in her autism programme, maybe we can get him wriggled out of serving prison time, and do it legally, without clandestine Time Lord technology. Because ugh, I can't imagine _that_ would go well for him – prison, I mean. Maybe we can strike a deal somehow, that he gets treatment instead of…"

He stopped short and stared at the screen.

"What's wrong?" Martha asked.

"No record," said the Doctor.

"Of what?"

"Of Olivia Paulsen," he said. "I mean… there are women named Olivia Paulsen out there, but none of them are psychiatrists, none of them happen to live anywhere near San Diego."

"Weird," Martha commented. "You say she's famous?"

"Well… yeah!" the Doctor answered. "Let me try…"

And he typed in something else.

"Nada!" he shouted. "How can this be? She is this planet's foremost expert on autism and guiding severely affected autism patients into productive lives. How can there be no record of her existence? Even when I do a search, combining autism, and her surname! That's just… _bonkers!"_

He was now tugging at his hair.

"Could you have got her name wrong?" Martha offered. "Or time period? Could she be early twenty- _second_ century, or maybe _thirty_ -first instead of twenty-first?"

"Martha, please," he chided, typing again. "I know what I'm talking about! Early twenty-first! American. Olivia Paulsen. She gives your world a number of aerospace geniuses, people who cure diseases and make strides in…"

"Okay, okay," she lulled, putting her hands on his arm. "You're getting worked up. Maybe her presence on the internet, or whatever, has been erased? Can people do that?"

"I suppose so, but the TARDIS would be able to…" then he stopped again. "Wait!"

He pulled a cable from below the console and seemed to plug it back into the column beside it.

"Okay, now… let's think outside the box, eh, old girl?" he asked, stroking the edge of the console. "Olivia Paulsen. Come on."

"What's it doing?" Martha wondered.

"Time's gone wonky. I thought it was localised, but now we know it's a fixed point. I reckon it's possible that something's gone wrong, and somehow Olivia Paulsen has been derailed and doesn't become the great autism scholar. It's even possible that we've been jogged into some kind of bizarro reality where she doesn't exist… though I can't imagine I wouldn't have noticed. But now the TARDIS is rigged to find her in any universe, in any dimension… ah ha! There she is!"

Martha hopped up to her feet and looked at the screen, and read through the amazing, world-changing accolades of Dr. Olivia Paulsen. "Wow," she commented, more than once, as she explored the theories and treatments of the prolific psychiatrist. "And you said that her legacy carries on?"

"Her legacy project is powerful," he said. "Long after her death, her intellectual descendants are still treating patients and turning out productive geniuses. Maybe three, four, five every decade who do something mind-boggling with science or math and carry human history forward. These people had been so oppressed and repressed and trapped in their own minds before she came along… _how can she not exist?"_

"Well, she exists somewhere," Martha pointed out. "I'm reading her profile now." With that, she kept reading.

The Doctor leaned against the console and scowled, pouting. "What the hell is this? Has the universe gone mad? Fixed points and… time just folding and overlapping around them like… like _time origami,_ like a sick joke by a bored, entitled Gallifreyan who's just moved into the dormitories at the Academy," he muttered. "Alien infiltration of all the computers on Earth, and now a major figure of note, in the annals of scientific advancement on this planet just… what? Disappears from history?"

"Er, Doctor?"

"I just can't see it!" he hissed. "It's all…"

"Doctor!"

"What?"

"Look," she said, pointing at a particular bit of text on the screen.

"Yeah, so? Olivia married Gerald Paulsen in 1996… oh!"

"See?"

"I see."

"Her maiden name!" Martha half-shouted, half-whispered.

The Doctor went pale. "Handler," he muttered. Then, "Are you bloody kidding me?"

* * *

The Doctor lay in bed that night with his arms behind his head, speculating, at a million miles per hour, over all the pieces of the puzzle. There was now a veritable _cast of characters_ that had become a part of this little drama, all revolving around George McPhail's delivering a plain brown package to Lillian Handler one afternoon in the late 1960s. And all of their lives somehow converged upon this one neighbourhood in Denver, Colorado.

"Lillian and Diane lived in that house with the rest of the family, obviously," said the Doctor. "George McPhail delivered letters there. Janet and Barry Hargreaves used to live somewhere near there – and from what Janet said, I'm thinking that Barry was probably born there and spent some childhood there"

"Doctor?" Martha asked, from beside him.

"And now the non-existent Olivia Paulsen… she might be related to the Handlers!"

"Doctor?"

"Is it something about that family?" he wondered. "Important in the grand scheme of Time and Space? I mean, Olivia should have had a lot to do with facilitating scientific advancement and whatnot, but she doesn't exist. So what gives?"

"Doctor!"

"But, no, no, no, no, no…" he said, trailing off. "What's McPhail got to do with it, if it's all about that family? Unless he broke them up. Unless he somehow prevented… but no, because he didn't break them up."

"Hello?"

"I honestly believe that Diane doesn't have a clue what happened between her mother and the postman, and even if she did, it's clear that he didn't break up Lillian and her husband," he continued. "We'd definitely know if he had, don't you think?"

"Oh, are you asking for my opinion now?" Martha wondered, shortly.

He frowned, looking at her. "What's with the tone?"

She turned on her side to face him, and smiled slightly. "Will you please give yourself a break? Don't you know that if you take a step back and look at it again with fresh eyes and good night's sleep, the whole thing will make more sense?"

"I'm not sure I can, Martha," he insisted. "The thing is under my skin now, and it's so…"

And with that, she slid her hand into a place that forced him to take in a sharp breath, and cut off his words. She smiled, stroked a bit, and he let his head loll back and exhaled with a resigned laugh.

"Well, now," he breathed, after regaining coherent thought. "That's playing dirty."

"Yes. It's one of the many things I do well," she told him. Then she whispered, "Turn off the brain, Doctor, and let me do the rest."

* * *

 **I realize that there's a lot of balls in the air now... please bear with me, it's all going somewhere! Annnnd... leave a review!**


	8. Chapter 8

**It is the morning after the revelation that Dr. Olivia Paulsen not only doesn't exist in this universe, but if she did, her last name would be Handler! And once again, there is still this blasted alien invasion to deal with, and UNIT to wade through...**

* * *

VIII

On Sunday, 14 September, once again, Diane Wesson was scheduled to turn up in the early afternoon to unlock the house.

The Doctor, while getting dressed that day, had speculated aloud that he could probably materialise the TARDIS right there in Mrs. Handler's living room and could bypass Diane's "permission" entirely.

"But blimey," he said, straightening his tie in front of his wardrobe mirror. "You think there's a wonky time anomaly in that living room now? Try putting a harbinger of the Time Vortex in the middle of it! Ho ho! Talk about twisting reality all out of shape!"

"And, it would be rude," Martha reminded him, sitting on the foot of the bed, pulling on her boots.

"What?" he asked, turning to look at her. Then, "Oh. Yeah, that too."

On the way out of the TARDIS, the Doctor pulled a USB drive from the console, and pocketed it. They went through the Handler house's side gate and headed for the UNIT truck, where they found, as usual, a space filled with buzzing officers, coffee flowing and computer screens blipping.

"Computers are back?" asked the Doctor.

"Apparently, most of the planet's computers have come back online now," Fortis said. "And if not, they are more or less fixable with standard anti-virus software. The media are beside themselves. No government agencies are talking, so they're just crawling out of their skin trying to get information, and/or make it up in a way that sounds plausible." His face looked dire.

"Probably because no government agency, save for the NSA, MI6 and UNIT, has any bloody idea what's happened," the Doctor said, also looking dire. "And they're not talking."

"Does that mean the Rehengese signal is buried so deeply now, that external things are back to normal? People can't even detect an interruption anymore?" Martha asked.

"Yeah," the two men replied in unison.

"Do you think it's harmful at all to try and use our equipment?" Fortis asked the Doctor. "I mean, I've been trying to get these guys to wait, but… well, you can see how well they've listened."

The Doctor sighed, and with almost no expression, he said, "It's probably fine. At this point, the Rehengese are well and truly in. Fortunately, you have me. Although, I'm really not sure what good I'll do." And he brandished the USB drive from his pocket.

"A TARDIS-produced anti-Rehengese code!" Fortis exclaimed, taking the drive. "This is brilliant!"

"Don't say _brilliant_ yet. Frankly, I didn't expect them to have burrowed this deep. Or to have put the human race this far off its guard, if they think they can just anti-virus everything back to normal working order," said the Doctor. "But it'll give us _something_ to work with."

Colonel Compton joined them then, and held out his hand. "I'll take that, Dr. Fortis."

"But…"

"You're a physicist, not a computer specialist," said the Colonel. "We have a protocol."

"You know, I really hate that word," Martha Jones commented to Compton.

Looking crestfallen, Larry handed over the USB drive.

"Tell your boys that it's a slow launch," said the Doctor. "Over the course of at least twelve, if not eighteen, hours. Any faster than that, and they'll see it coming."

"Thank you."

Colonlel Compton took a few steps away, before the Doctor called out, "You know what? Maybe I should do it myself."

"We have top-notch computer guys, military grade," said Compton.

"But you've also got a Time Lord," said Fortis. "Why not let him…"

"Fortis, zip it. Doctor, thank you, but this is something we can do. You do the thing that only _you_ can do."

Fortis looked at the Doctor and Martha with a pained expression.

* * *

Colonel Compton released the whole of the UNIT crew for the day, except for two computer specialists and advised them all to find restaurants, cinemas, museums, bars and the like. He ordered them to check back in at five-o'clock, but to "blow off some steam" before then. He thanked them for their service and dismissed them for the next eight hours.

The Time Lord, the M.D. and the physicist took the opportunity (and one of the UNIT-issue black Jeeps) to have brunch and a conference call with Tish. She had been kept relatively-up-to-date on the time anomaly by Larry over the past two days, but when the Doctor and Martha added their two cents, including the bit about Janet and Barry Hargreaves and Olivia Handler-Paulsen, she had a few choice curses for the occasion.

"I don't see how you can hang out with these people, Larry," she said. "Come home and be normal with me."

He pulled a face, looking confused and whimsical all at the same time. "Erm, I honestly have no idea how to respond to that. Other than, of course, to comment on the fact that I've managed to convince you I'm normal, so, yay me."

When they returned to the Handler house, it was five minutes past noon, and the UNIT truck was there, but virtually empty. A Honda sedan was parked across the street near the dinged-up mint-green Ford Fairlane. When the black Jeep arrived and Fortis, Martha and the Doctor disembarked, Diane Wesson climbed out of the Honda.

"Hi," said Diane, crossing the street.

"Why are you parked way over there?" asked Larry.

"My mother is terrified of the house," she sighed.

They all looked at her car and saw an elderly lady sitting in the front passenger's seat. They waved at her, and she waved back, while checking her lipstick.

Diane opened the garage door with a remote control, then used a key to open the door to the house, bade them _au revoir_ , and then began to cross the street again.

"I guess I could see it," Fortis muttered, studying Lillian Handler from across the street. "There might be something a little wild in her eyes. Something that says _I once shagged the postman._ "

"Nah, you're just projecting because you know she did," Martha muttered back.

"Besides," the Doctor whispered. "There's nothing that says she only shagged the postman once."

* * *

Over the next three hours, Larry insisted on taking more measurements in the living room. He and the Doctor talked them through, and discovered that though the nature of the anomaly hadn't actually changed, _something_ was ramping up.

"There's an increasing intensity," he had said, squinting at his equipment.

"The time fissure is opening, the fold-over is becoming more and more creased…" the Doctor told him, ruminating worriedly. "The past is becoming more insistent upon the present."

"How is that even… what the… I mean, Doctor…"

The Doctor put on his glasses and took the apparatus from Fortis' hands. "According to this… what do you call it?"

"The Weirdness Detector."

"Okay. Well, at the rate that the insistence, the _imprint_ , the intensity of this thing has been increasing, in about two days, it's going to reach critical mass."

"Critical mass?" Martha asked. "Sounds great. Not at all apocalyptic."

The Doctor handed the device back to Larry. "I wish I could reassure you," he said to her. "But this definitely has the feeling of a countdown. Like the time loop is only going to continue for so long, and then… again, critical mass. There's an _event_ that this is all leading towards."

"The fixed point?" she asked.

He shook his head. "The fixed point feels like something else. Like whatever this is all building towards, and the fixed point, they are accessories to one another somehow. Does that make sense?"

"Of course not," she answered, with a shrug.

"Obviously, the countdown is most likely to the Rehengese invasion," the Doctor said, gritting his teeth and pulling at his hair. "But what postman delivering a package to Lillian has to do with it… I just can't see it yet. Fixed point leads to something drastic... but what's the relationship?"

"Fixed point?" asked Larry.

"Yeah," the Doctor sighed. A wave of nausea took him then, and he sat down on the sofa. He took a minute to get his bearings, then, "A fixed point in time is a moment or series of moments that are so pivotal to the fabric of Time, Space and Reality that they _must happen_. They cannot be missed or bent or mucked-about-with, no matter how difficult they are to accept."

"The butterfly effect?"

"Sort of," the Doctor conceded. "But… to the extreme. A few months ago, a friend and I, we found ourselves in Pompeii on volcano day. She wanted to warn the townspeople to get out. She wanted to find a way to stop the destruction, or at least do something about that enormous death toll, but I wouldn't let her. Because in my Time Lord gut, I knew it would be wrong. I could see the fabric of reality and what would happen to the Earth and Time itself if the carnage following that eruption were averted in any way. And she hated me for it, but… well, it was a hell of a day. Let's just say that I facilitated the eruption and twenty-thousand people died, but Time marches on."

"Wow."

"There are moments like that all over history. They are inevitable. And only a Time Lord can sense them."

"So… only _you_ can sense them now."

The Doctor pursed his lips and nodded sadly.

"That's quite the burden, Doctor," Fortis commented.

Again, the Doctor nodded. "The moment when the postman rings the bell and comes to that door there," he explained, pointing to Lillian Handler's front door. "Is a fixed point in time. And somehow, it all revolves around the parcel he's trying to deliver to her. I knew it the moment I looked at the package. Something in that box has the potential to destroy life in the universe as we know it… I just don't know what that means yet."

"So what you're saying is," Fortis said, sitting down beside the Doctor. "My weirdness detector is picking up some kind of buildup of intensity, or the past becoming, as you said, more insistent upon the present, perhaps each time the postman visits. Each time the two-day cycle restarts."

"Yes…"

"And if the intensity increases this way over the next two days, there's going to be some kind of eruption? So to speak? Critical mass? All of this is building to something, something like an alien invasion? But that invasion can't be the fixed point because the fixed point is, indeed, happening over and over right here, in this living room, every two days or so?"

"Yes. Only, it's not being carried to completion somehow."

Larry exhaled heavily. "Well... shit."

"Welcome to my world," Martha mused, sitting down in one of the canister chairs in front of the window on the right.

There was a longer-than-usual silence while the three of them just sat in the living room and contemplated their lot.

Suddenly, someone burst through the garage door. "Doctor!"

"What?" asked the Time Lord, startled out of his train of thought. "Who are you?"

"I'm Sergeant Hart, sir," said the man. He was in uniform, but not wearing the UNIT beret. He was broad and bald, and had a ruddy, nervous look about him. He gulped as he spoke to the Doctor. "I'm a computer specialist. I think you'd better come quick."

"What's happened?"

"Well… Colonel Compton ordered me to communicate with the NSA and MI6 before launching the code you gave us," he said, beginning to perspire. "I was forced to share the code with them, and help them analyse it, to decide whether…"

The Doctor jumped to his feet with a deep scowl. "Let me guess. You sent them the files I gave you via e-mail or some other regular internet route…lots of code firing across communication channels in two different directions."

"Yes, sir."

"The Rehengese picked up on it, didn't they?" asked the Doctor, advancing forward on the man with fury in his eyes.

"I don't know, sir, but…" Sergeant Hart pulled the USB from his pocket and handed it to the Doctor. "See for yourself."

The Doctor took it angrily, and the Sergeant, the physician and the physicist followed him out through the garage back to the UNIT truck. He plugged the USB into the nearest computer, and saw that the code the TARDIS had written had been completely dismantled, and replaced by the black-screened, Rehengese code going by.

"Damn it!" the Doctor shouted, kicking a chair over. He rounded on Colonel Compton, who had been standing by, waiting for the Doctor's arrival. "How could you do this?"

"I agreed with the NSA and MI6 that I would take no action concerning the impending threat, without their input," he answered, in a very clipped military voice. "I thought it best not to discuss it with you."

"Because you knew he'd advise against it," Martha assumed, in very much the same clipped voice.

"Bloody right, I'd advise against it!" the Doctor shouted. "Colonel Compton, it _really_ never occurred to you that by putting this code out on the internet that it could be seen, anticipated and undone by the Rehengese? The alien race that slipped in under all of Earth's firewalls, and who I have said have the most wormy, insidious, sneaky technology, possibly in the universe?"

Compton's gaze changed, softening. "No, it didn't."

"Doctor, sir," Sergeant Hart said. "I did try to warn him."

"You will stifle yourself, Sergeant," the Colonel ordered.

The Doctor walked down a row of computers and kicked over, this time, a rubbish bin. It made a loud _clang_ as it hit the floor and several coffee cups rolled out and spilled on the light blue carpet.

Martha, in the meantime, moved in front of the computer now displaying the text of the Rehengese. "Wait, I can read this," she said with surprise.

"Yeah?" the Doctor asked. "Probably because they want you to. Or because… I don't know, the code was written by the TARDIS, and its translation circuit's software might still be insinuated in the original code somewhere, which the Rehengese have converted to their own text."

Fortis looked at it over her shoulder. "I can't read it," he told her. "It still looks like some kind of alterna-Sanskrit to me. You can read that?"

"Yeah," she told him. "Well, not all of it. Just parts. I can see… _Hello, Time Lord. Peek-a-boo._ "

"What?" asked Larry.

"They're telling the Doctor they know he's here now, they know he's involved."

The Doctor let out a guttural curse, and began to pace again.

"Then, more rubbish, at least to my eyes," she said. "Oh, here we go. _Hello, TARDIS. Beautiful codes – we'll have those off you. Nice try…_ then more rubbish."

"Oh, great," Fortis commented. He turned to Compton. "Are you happy with yourself?"

Compton's face turned red, but he said nothing.

"Now some quantity of alien scum has an _in_ on the Doctor's TARDIS," he said. "Time travel, teleportation, the base code to the universe, et cetera, et cetera. It's just a matter of time. Pardon the pun."

"Well," the Doctor said, clearing his throat, and forcing his voice out of anger and into check. "We can stand here and place blame if we want to – and believe you me, it would be very satisfying to delineate for Colonel Compton all of the various and sundry ways he's just fucked up the universe – or we can push forward and try to solve this problem before everything goes kerplooey."

"How the hell do we do that?" asked Fortis.

"I do it by doing what I do best," the Doctor said. "Studying the fabric of Time. Because I remain more convinced than ever that all of this is intertwined with the postman who canoodles the lady of this house, and whatever the hell is in that plain brown package."

"How's that, exactly?" asked Compton.

The Doctor basically ignored him, and made an absent mental note basically to ignore him forever. "Martha and I now have no choice but to do this our way. Well, we were planning on doing that anyhow, so it works out."

* * *

 **Don't forget a review! Make my weekend!**


	9. Chapter 9

**A fixed point in time focused on a package. A postman on a two-day time loop trying to deliver said package to a married woman with whom he was having an affair. An impending alien attack. Our pals at UNIT have messed up the dissemination of the anti-Rehengese virus. But they still need to ward off the technological attack somehow... now our heroes have no choice but to start gumshoeing about in different time periods...**

 **On that note, this chapter will pack a punch! Warning: there is some harsh language here.**

 **I had three challenges with this chapter. 1) How mean and coarse does our friend George really need to get, in order to be a fleshed-out character? 2) How to illustrate unhinged-but-sincere? 3) The lingo. I feel like these two characters talk like they're living in the 21st century, but they're a couple of forty-year-olds in the 60's. Hopefully what they're saying is straightforward and universal enough that it doesn't matter much.**

 **Or maybe it's that the TARDIS is "translating" for Martha ;-).**

 **Shout out to my unofficial Beta, my good friend Miggs who enjoys the unhinged aspects.**

 **I hope this makes you shudder just a little! Enjoy!**

* * *

IX

The Doctor and Martha briefly returned to the TARDIS to warn her of the impending attack by the Rehengese, now that they had a way of getting into her systems. Reassuringly, she did not seem worried. They also picked up the lug nuts they had rigged to become high-level perception filters and put them around their necks.

"Ready?" asked the Doctor.

"Ready as I'll ever be," Martha answered.

They tested the filters by walking into the UNIT truck, and when no-one noticed them at all, including Larry, even when they both sat down on either side of him at computer work stations, they were satisfied that the devices worked. They went into the Handler house via the garage door, then out through the front door, and into a day in the 1960's when everything changed somehow for a postman, and a red-haired lady on his route. They raised the garage door then by hand and spied, as Martha had before, a shiny black Chevrolet with a plush toy in the rear window. They shut it behind them, then eased open the door to the house.

"I have to say, even for me, this is weird," the Doctor whispered with a sour look on his face. "Didn't we just leave this house?"

Immediately, they heard noises coming from the bedroom.

"Ugh," Martha groaned.

The Doctor snuck in ahead of her, and his eyes darted round the space. Upon the kitchen counter, he spied a newspaper laying open, with a cold cup of coffee and an ashtray sitting on top of it. He reckoned it was today's paper, since a homemaker in the 1960's would have needed the counter clear for breakfast and dinner. He flipped the paper back to see the front page. It was the Thursday, May 12, 1966 edition of _The Denver Post_. He showed it to Martha; they now had a date to work with.

A loud moan, a squeal and laughter came from down the hall. From there, the sound of wood repeatedly pounding the wall filled the air, accompanied by a short, high squeak with each strike. In spite of herself, Martha stifled a giggle. The Doctor smirked at her, then made his way toward the noise.

He knew what he'd find, but he was drawn to the scene; had to see for himself. Surely enough, there was a rather stunning, porcelain-skinned, red-haired woman lying on her back on the bed, with her legs wrapped around a man. He was thrusting, growling at her, knocking the headboard against the white, green and peach wallpapered surface behind it. She arched her back and began to huff encouragements at him.

Martha came up behind him and took a peek. "This is different from what I saw before," she whispered.

"Maybe we're early," he said.

With that, the watched woman seemed to flush all over, she screamed and cursed and gripped at the arms of the man. And then the intensity in her seemed to subside, as it does.

The Doctor whispered, "I can't seem to look away."

"I wonder why," Martha chuckled.

"Maybe it's like a train wreck," he speculated.

"Yeah, that's what it's like," she muttered, sarcastically.

The woman on the bed then said with a heady, breathy voice, "All right you. On your back."

With the change of position, the Doctor instinctively pulled back and out of sight of the lovers, though he knew he couldn't really be seen. At this stage, Martha recognised the tableau as roughly where she had entered before, with Lillian Handler straddling, and only visible from the back, her partner's eyes fixed on her bouncing bosom.

"Okay," said the Doctor as he stepped back into the doorway. "I see the letter bag. The shoulder strap is hanging off the footboard."

" _That_ is what you're getting from this?" she asked, with another chuckle.

"Sorry. Just trying to look somewhere else."

"I wonder if everyone will get their post today," Martha wondered, whimsically, after about thirty seconds passed.

"Certainly doesn't seem like it, does it?" the Doctor speculated. He looked at his wrist as though to check the time. "He'd better get a shift on."

In a few minutes, the cries grew louder again, and both spectators stepped aside, to hide their view of the proceedings. Both parties on the bed were nearing climax, with, as Martha had described, phrases like, "Yes, yes, yes," and "Oh God," escaping in the form of moans and exclamations. Before long, an eruption of sorts came forth from both participants' voices, as though they were competing to be heard.

"Does this mean it's over?" the Doctor asked, his eyes shut tight.

"Sounds like it. Thank God."

There was only panting for a few moments, and then George asked, "What's wrong?"

The Doctor and Martha leaned in once again to see what would happen. They saw Lillian, still sitting astride him, her hands on his shoulders, presumably in a post-coital catching-of-breath. Though from the evidence, her face was also registering some kind of dismay.

"You know what's wrong, George," Lillian Handler said.

"Ugh," groaned George. "Again?"

With that, she flung her right leg to the left and extricated herself from the literal entanglement on the bed. She walked naked and spectacular over to the corner where a white and blue flowered housedress had been flung, and she picked it up, shook out the wrinkles, then laid it carefully out on the vanity.

As she did so, he sat up and asked, "Aw, are you having another attack of conscience?" His tone was syrupy sweet, bordering on sarcasm, and his lower lip stuck out slightly.

She was not facing him. "It's not _another attack_. It's constant. Constant guilt, constant paranoia…"

He stood up from the bed as well, and walked round it. By now, she was climbing into some undergarments that she had found amongst the pile of U.S. Postal-Service-issue garb, but he made no effort to dress just yet.

"Paranoia? About being caught?"

"Yes," she said, quietly.

"Oh, come on," he scolded. "Don't give me that. The possibility of being found-out is what gets you going!"

"No, George, you're wrong."

"I'm wrong? Remember the time when we were doing it on the sofa, and Mrs. Eichen rang the doorbell?"

"That was six months ago," she reminded him.

"So what? Anyone who was actually _afraid_ of getting caught would have stopped riding me. Would have fallen silent and pretended not to be home! Instead, you called out 'I'll be right there, Mae!' and made her wait on the doorstep while you _finished_. And then I hid in the linen closet!" He was laughing by this time.

"Yeah, yeah, I remember, all right?" she said, harshly, cutting off his chortling. Now in her bra and pants, she put her hands on her hips in exasperation. "Look, maybe at first, that sort of thing turned me on, but… you know, you and I are getting more and more brazen. When we first started this thing, you'd come over around noon, and we were finished by one-thirty, and you were gone by two. Now… Jesus, you don't even get here until almost three! Last Monday, we had to sneak you out the bedroom window because you were still here when John came home! I had my blouse on inside-out, and didn't have dinner started, and I had to make up an excuse!"

"Is that what this is about? You're worried he'll know you're fooling around because you didn't have a casserole in the oven?"

"No," she spat. She turned and plucked his boxer shorts from the mass of clothing on the floor, and tossed them at him. "Get your clothes on, would you?"

He obliged by putting on only the shorts, and asked, "Look, Lilly, if you want me to start coming by around noon again, then I can. If you don't want to be so _brazen_ then I'll make sure I'm out of here in plenty of time. John won't find out, I promise."

"George, that's not going to solve the problem."

"I see. So once again, your guilty conscience rears its head." His tone was drippy sweet again.

"It's not about a guilty conscience anymore. At least not in the way you think. It's not just about stepping out on my husband. It's about my family. Last Monday John almost found out, but even worse than that…"

She had trailed off then, and now stood motionless, eyes wide, contemplating her lover. On her face, Martha thought she could read a weighing of options. Martha could anticipate some of what Lillian might be thinking, because she had been through the "affair" revelation with her own dad. She thought that when Lillian looked at George, she must know that there was almost no chance that he would understand what it was _really_ about, and she was wondering if she should even bother to try and explain. It would just lead to more of _this._

But she did try, after George asked, "Even worse than that… what?"

"Even worse than that, the previous week, Diane almost found out," said Lillian.

"How is that _worse_?"

"She's my daughter!"

"So?"

"Don't you know what a thing like this could do to her? How much it could hurt her?"

"Why? You're not cheating on _her_!"

The Doctor and Martha looked at each other in disbelief.

And indeed, Lillian laughed bitterly at his non-comprehension. "No, but I'm betraying her father. He has the personality and excitement-level of a cardboard box, but it doesn't matter – he's her daddy. He and I are supposed to be her foundation, her example of what love should look like, of how a family is supposed to be. If she found out what you and I are up to, what's she supposed to think? How's she going to make any sort of sense out of life, and marriage, and how a mother is to feel about her family?"

George shrugged. "She's a child. What the hell would she even know about it?"

"She's sixteen, George," Lillian responded. "She's old enough to understand what we're doing, and that it's wrong. But not really old enough to put it into perspective. She's going to think that I don't love her father, and by extension that I don't care about my family, which means _her_ and her brother and sister. Don't you see?"

George crossed to the armchair and began to step into his postman's trousers. "Clearly, I don't. Like I said, I'll just get out of here before she gets home from school. She's there until all hours anyhow, doing whatever she does… what is she, in drama club?"

Lillian took the cue and began to pull her dress over her arms then. "Drama and cheerleading," she muttered. Then, "No, no, you're missing the point."

"Just what _is_ the point, Lillian?" He stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting.

"The point is, if I'm going to give my children the best example of a good mother, a good wife, a good leader, a good member of a family, of a community, then I can't just _not get caught_ being horrible. I actually have to _not be_ horrible."

With that, she tied off the sash, and smoothed out the dress.

"So, you're ending this with me," he concluded.

Lillian contemplated, as though she hadn't fully realised where this conversation would lead. Contrary to what she had said, it was obvious to Martha that she _was_ having an attack of conscience in that moment, but perhaps it would finally facilitate a change.

"Yes, I think I am," Lillian answered after a few beats. "For the sake of my family, George."

He frowned now too. "You don't even love him!" he whined.

"I do love him, it's just…"

"He doesn't satisfy you!"

"No," she admitted. "Not by a long shot. A very, very long shot. But he's…"

"I know. A good, steady man with integrity and good bearing and he's the father of your children." He said this with a high-pitched, mocking tone. "I've heard it all before."

"Because it's all true."

"Oh, what a big snooze!"

"Just who do you think you are?" she asked, her hands on her hips again. Suddenly, she looked very proper and serious.

"I'm someone who gives you what you need," he practically shouted now. "I'm someone who cares about _you_ , Lillian, on the inside, about what you want, deserve and enjoy! Call it providence, call it an act of God if you like, but I'm on this mail route for a reason. I'm a gift to you, and more importantly, I love you!"

George seemed surprised that this had come tumbling out of his mouth. The Doctor and Martha both separately assumed that it was the first time this revelation had come to light.

"Well," she said, her mouth having gone dry. "So does my husband. And being with him doesn't make me feel like a terrible person." Her voice shook a bit now.

"No, it makes you feel like a pillar of salt," he argued. He now got extremely close to her, took her fingertips lightly in his, without raising them from their position at her sides. With a voice very low and secretive, he asked, "Lilly, when was the last time he made love to you?"

"What?" she responded, in a non-secretive manner.

"Better question: when was the last time he did anything other than get on top of you and push and grunt until he was done, then turn over and fall asleep?"

"I…"

He now stroked her neck just below her ear, with the backs of two fingers. "When was the last time he made you come?"

"George!" she exclaimed, and batted his hand away.

He grabbed her by the arms rather hard now, and continued, louder. "When was the last time he made you come so hard that your eyes rolled back in your head? Or you broke a nail clawing at something?"

"Stop it!" she spat, more annoyed than hurt or frightened.

"When was the last time he made you scream? Has he _ever_ managed to do that? Has he ever made you pant and whimper and yip like a lap dog, like I just did?"

"Jesus Christ, George!" she hissed, and tried to pull away from him.

He would not let her. He now grasped her wrists at an awkward angle, forcing her to stay put.

Very low again, almost at a whisper he asked, "Lilly, you told me about that very first time with him; it was in the attic bedroom in your parents' house, in 1946. Twenty years ago, when he was apprenticing his father, and you were home from college for the weekend. You said it lasted less than two minutes, but you were _sure_ it would get better."

"It did," she said, meekly.

"Maybe so, but come on, now. How many times in all those years has he brought you to the point where you _really, really_ wanted it?"

Stubbornly, Lillian stared at the floor and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know what I'm talking about, because I've seen you at that point, Lilly. It's that point where, if he doesn't just fuck you right now, and hard, you will absolutely fall apart. When has _John_ given you that?"

She closed her eyes and exhaled… with exhaustion, with resignation, with realisation. For the observers outside the bedroom door, it was difficult to say.

"I don't know," she whispered. "Maybe never."

He moved his mouth in closer. His lips were now less than an inch from her ear. "How many times have you begged him for more? Begged him to do it to you one more time because it was just _so good_ and so delicious and you've just _got_ to have it in you again…"

She wriggled free of him, and he let her. "That's enough!"

"Listen, I only ask because…"

"I know why you ask," she interrupted. "And you're right. You do all of those things. You bring out the fiend in me. You make me scream and scratch and beg and keep me so satisfied, I actually don't know how I'll do without it. But I'll manage."

"Why even try, Lilly? Why are you even thinking of going back? If you think it's wrong for us to carry on while you're married, then make a clean break! Leave him, and just… be with me."

"I can't do that! You know that!"

"I love you, I swear it," he said, his voice hard and serious. "And I would be a better partner to you than he ever was! I can be a provider, I can be earnest and stable and all of that. And you know I can keep you coming and screaming and…"

"George, please."

He fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around her hips. "I would _worship_ this body," he insisted, running his hands over her hips and bum. "I would never leave it wanting. I would never leave _you_ wanting. I would never let you get to a place where you are getting your kicks from someone else – never!"

She pushed his shoulders away. "You're making this harder than it has to be."

He sat back on his heels. "Wouldn't it be a better example to your daughter just to come clean, let your husband be free, and take up with someone new, rather than have her know that you played around behind his back?"

"What would be even better is if I honoured my vows and my commitment to my family."

He stood. "And never again get the good hard screwing that you crave? That you deserve? That your pussy deserves?" He grabbed her by the hips and ground his pelvis against her.

She stepped away hastily, toward the door. The spectators moved out of the way.

"Why do you have to use language like that? You're disgusting," Lillian complained, though it sounded completely contrived.

Something in him snapped then. The whimsy was gone. The playful mocking was gone. The supplication was gone.

The air in the room changed palpably with the shift in McPhail's demeanour. The Doctor and Martha looked at one another, each with a feeling of foreboding. _This_ was where events would begin to play out into tomorrow, leading to a pivotal moment that affects all of time and space. The Doctor knew it in his Time Lord gut. Martha could just feel it in George's very human misery.

"Yeah," George growled, eyeing Lillian sideways, darkly. He bent for his shirt and began to put it on. "Well, _disgusting_ is what you love."

"No," she protested, but not very convincingly. She fiddled with the lapels of her dress.

"No? So, you're really all shocked and shaken because I used some naughty _language_? Do you know that not one hour ago, you were on your knees in the living room with my cock in your mouth?"

"I know, I remember."

His voice went even harder, and the words came out like bullets. "With your fingers in your cunt, and my come sliding down your throat."

"I know."

Anger escalated in his voice. "And now, you're what? June-Goddamn-Cleaver?"

"A lady can try," she lilted. She stood for a moment and watched him dress.

"A lady?" he scoffed. Then, low and gravelly, but with an intensity that could cut glass, he told her, "Lillian, once something is tainted, there's no cleaning it up again."

"Tainted?" she asked, her eyes narrowed with confusion.

"You can turn over a new leaf and be a good wife and a good member of a family all you like," he said. "It won't change the fact that you're a slut."

She nodded calmly, not at all surprised by his answer.

"Prim and fucking proper," he said. "Family woman. Mother of three. Perfect in every way. But I've seen what happens to you, Lillian Handler, when you've got an urge, when the desire grabs you and you get all pink and wet down there. You can't keep your knees together or your feet on the floor, can you?"

"I can. I've just been making the wrong choices."

"No, you can't," he insisted, his finger now in her face. "I know you too well. You could get rid of me, but it would be just a matter of time before you'd be bouncing up and down on some other guy's rod because you would never, ever get it from that limp fish you call a husband. Mark my words. You're wired a certain way, my darling. Once a slut, always a slut."

She was finally, _finally_ angry now. She batted his hand away, then crossed her arms defensively over her chest. "Is that any way to talk to someone you claimed to love, not five minutes ago?"

He leaned back and crossed his own arms, looking her over. He seemed to think about what she said. Then, "Oh, I love you – I can't help myself. But I know what you are."

"You know what I am?" she asked, in disbelief. "So, what, you'll worship me, never leave me wanting, appreciate me, blah, blah, blah, but remind me of what a low-down whore I am?"

"All of that worshipping and appreciation and never-leave-you-wanting still stands, Lillian," he told her, his voice still rather hardened. "I can't change that I'm in love with you! And I love you _because_ you're like that. Because you're insatiable. Because you behave like a whore when you've got the itch under your skin! I just can't understand why you would choose to carry out this life lying in bed next to Friar Tuck, and very occasionally under him. During which, you'd be checking your watch the whole time and wishing he were _me._ "

"Well, we've established that you can't understand, so why don't we just end this farce now, eh?"

"I swear, if you'd come to your senses, I wouldn't talk to you like that! I wouldn't call you names. I only did that because…"

"…because I'm so damn stupid?"

"I didn't say you're stupid."

"So, if I had _come to my senses_ and decided be with you instead of my husband ten minutes ago when this whole argument started, I wouldn't have heard any of what you actually think of me? I'm a slut? I'm a whore? You love me only because I fuck like a banshee?"

"Listen to me…"

"No!" she shouted. "You mock me for having a goddamned conscience and for wanting to do the right thing. Then you beg me to leave my husband for you and swear that you'll always be the perfect lover. Then you call me a slut and imply that I'm an imbecile… and you still want to be with me? Think I'd be crazy enough to turn my life over to you? Have you lost your mind, George?"

"You belong with me, and you know it," he said, slowly, darkly, teeth gritted. "I _need_ you. Do you understand me?"

Everyone in the room could see that he was holding back some kind of outburst, that he would have liked to lash out, to have his way and be done with not having the upper hand – whatever that meant. The intensity in his eyes and words gave Lillian pause, and she took a step away. "George, you're scaring me a little. Let's just calm down. Both of us."

She then turned and walked through the bedroom door, straight past a Time Lord and his Companion, who were standing, riveted in the hallway.

George followed her out into the living room and grabbed her arm and yanked it. "Don't tell me to calm down! Now listen! I want you with me, now and forever."

"Well you can't have me with you, now and forever," she said, weary. "I'm married. I have a family. I have obligations."

"I don't fucking care about any of that!"

"Well, I fucking do!" After a pause, she said, "On top of which, you are more than a little unhinged."

He looked her over with dark, brooding eyes. "You are a stubborn woman, Lillian. And brave."

"Yeah? Thanks. I try."

"It wasn't a compliment."

"Well, I took it as one."

"I won't stand for it."

"Stand for what?"

"I won't stand for your stubbornness, do you hear me?"

"I hear you. I think you've lost your mind, but I hear you."

"You'd do well to drop the _strong woman_ routine, now, Lillian," he said, his voice creeping like a shadow. "Because I am not playing games now."

"I'm not either, George."

"I will not lose you."

"You don't have a choice," she said, walking away, into the kitchen.

He followed her, and the Doctor and Martha followed him. "I'll give you one last chance. You and I belong together. You know it in your head, in your heart and in your cunt. You're just too brain-addled to see it right now, for some reason."

"Brain addled?" she mocked, with eyes squinted. "Must be my whorish nature. Maybe you just didn't give it to me hard enough to bang any sense into me today."

"Because I love you, I will let that pass," he sang, all too evenly. Then he disappeared into the bedroom and came back with his letter bag.

"Oh good. You're finally leaving. You can just leave my mail in the box tomorrow, okay?"

He went for the front door. "I'll ring the bell tomorrow at noon," he told her. "That's what you said you'd like."

"No, I didn't! What is the matter with you?"

"I'll be back at noon, and I'll give you one more chance. Hopefully, by then, you'll see it the way I see it."

"Don't hold your breath," she muttered, pulling a package of egg noodles out of the cabinet.

"If you don't, there will be consequences," he said, shutting the front door behind him.

* * *

 ***gasp!* Don't forget to leave a review! :-D**


	10. Chapter 10

**This chapter has** **two big plot revelations! Ooooh! This is where you might actually start to work out the game!**

 **Hope you enjoy it!**

* * *

X

The Doctor and Martha had no choice but to follow George McPhail out the front door, not knowing if Lillian would notice the door opening and shutting a second time. Once outside, the Doctor turned to the left immediately, and was sick in the bushes.

Martha stood on the sidewalk and watched the postman walk to the next house and drop off a small handful of letters in the black iron box attached to their front porch, then move on to the next.

"Come on," she urged. "We can't let him turn the corner." She walked briskly after him.

The Doctor gathered himself and then jogged to catch up with her. "Good job we got out the door. Lillian would _definitely_ have noticed _that_ happening in her house."

They followed a house or two behind as George hurried through the rest of his route. As he finished up, he exited the neighbourhood by walking south, and he returned to his mail truck, parked in the lot of a bowling alley. He threw his letter bag into the back, he trudged up to the door and went inside, and the Doctor and Martha followed. At that point, George stopped at the bar and downed a whiskey, then ordered another one. While he waited, a man with greasy black hair, a large nose and five-o'clock-shadow approached him and invited him to join in on a game. George accepted, and walked away from the bar with his whiskey in-hand.

The Doctor and Martha sat down at a table on the upper platform behind the alley where George and his friends played their game.

"Now what?" asked Martha after watching the boys bowl and high-five one another for several minutes. "We just watch him get drunk and knock down pins, and then follow him home later?"

She glanced over at him after he didn't answer.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Nauseated again?"

"No," he said, pulling his hand down over his face. "It's just… that whole scene reminded me…"

"Of?"

"Of us. A couple of weeks ago."

"Us? Really?"

"Yes," he muttered. After a pause, he added, "What an arse."

"Who, George?"

"Yeah, and me."

She sighed. "Doctor, something had happened to you, causing you to _go rogue_ , remember? It's not like you, in your right mind, talk like that all the time. To me, or anyone else."

"I know but…" he exhaled through pursed lips. "Martha, hearing him go after her like that… it was a fairly traumatic sense memory."

"It didn't bother me, why should it bother you?"

"You're not the one who inflicted it on someone you love," he pointed out. "You are clearly better able to separate yourself – separate us both – from the fail-safe incident. From who I was, who we were… what we turned each other into."

"Clearly, I am," she agreed. "And I don't know why. Other than, maybe… well, my life is short. Too short to dwell on the past, which, under normal circumstances, cannot be changed."

He nodded, clearly not comfortable with this finality.

"I'm sorry it hit you so hard to hear George say those things," she conceded.

He shook his head. "Sorry. Just… hearing how it sounded… so ugly. So degrading. To them both – not just her. But mostly her."

"I know."

"Trying to possess her, threatening her if she tries to walk away," he said. "For months, delighting in how insatiable and independent she is, and then holding it against her. Using her sexuality as a reason why she's weak and can't live without him… ugh. It's like emotional entrapment."

"Yeah, Doctor," she said, shrugging. "It's the kind of thing guys like that say. They'll use a person's strength as a weapon, make them think that they're deviant for having it. Or make them believe that that strength is dependent upon the arsehole in question. But you are not a _guy like that._ "

"It's in me, though."

"There's a little of that in all of us, don't you think?" she asked. "I won't say it's _human nature,_ because that wouldn't apply to you anyway… but it's a mechanism of survival. It's unfortunate, but there it is. It's our choices that make us _not_ like George. Your choice, for example, was to rebuild the fail-safe, and resubmit yourself to it."

"I guess."

"George, well… maybe he doesn't have a chance at normalcy," she speculated, watching the postman bowl. "No-one turned him inside-out and crushed him under hyper-gravity and made him that way. He's just a mal-adjust with bad judgement and no Time Lord mojo. He's just looking for a shag like any other bloke, but falls haphazardly in love with this married woman. But he isn't self-actualised enough to handle rejection gracefully, so he goes for it whole-hog and then can't cope when he loses control over the woman. It's… well, dangerous. And it's not _you_."

The Doctor was quiet for a long time. Eventually, he asked, "When we were watching Lillian and George argue, you really didn't have any internal hearkening back to that conversation we had two weeks ago? When you were going to leave me, and I played dirty to get you to stay?"

"Not so much," she said, shrugging. "To me, it's a totally different situation. And you know what lies at the heart of that difference?"

"What?"

"The nature of the man, Doctor," she said.

He nodded subtly.

She continued. "I'll admit, though, before we knew what he was really like, I was feeling sorry for him, maybe over-identifying with him a bit. I was thinking that if he loved her and she didn't love him back… well, I could relate to that. I thought, that could be me out there, on a time-loop, knocking on someone's door over and over again…"

"Mine?" he wondered, miserably.

"Of course," she said. "But it _isn't_ me because circumstances have changed. I'm not on a time-loop. I gave myself room to grow."

He smiled. "You're starting to make some sense," he admitted, sighing.

"Again, I'm sorry that it disturbed you so much but… can't you take _some_ solace in hearing me say that I'm totally fine with all of it?"

"I suppose I can."

"And in the fact that you've saved every planet in the universe an average of one-hundred-and-twenty-seven times each, and George spends his free hours bowling and drinking whiskey?"

"Well, _that bit_ remains to be seen," said the Doctor, switching gears completely. "The bowling and whiskey bit. What's he going to do between now and tomorrow at noon? _Something else_ has to happen, Martha. Something is in that package, and… well, I reckon it's not a new pair of bowling shoes, or a bottle of Wild Turkey." He leaned forward and watched George intently.

"So, I suppose that answers my original question: what do we do now? We follow him home, see what we can see."

"Yeah," the Doctor said, absently. "But…"

"What?"

"It feels like a waste of manpower. Or womanpower," he corrected himself with a smile. "There's two of us, one of him, all we have to do is _watch,_ and we have less than forty-eight hours until the Rehengese make themselves spectacularly, and anarchically, known."

"Or forty-two years, depending on your point of view," she reminded him.

"There's still so much we don't know, Martha," he mused, more or less ignoring her observation. "I know in my gut that if we can work out why George's package delivery on 13 May, 1966 is a fixed point in time and space, we can thwart the Rehengese attack on 16 September, 2008. There _has_ to be a connection, but as of yet, I have no idea what that connection is… other than, maybe Barry Hargreaves grew up in a house somewhere near where the fixed point occurs."

"That's a big connection, yeah?"

"Yes!" he agreed. "But until I know _how_ they are connected, I can't do anything! I feel crippled!"

"Okay, then. One of us follows McPhail home tonight…"

"That will be me," he said. "It's not safe for you."

"Then I go back to 2008 and do some other sort of reconnaissance."

"Yes. Do that. Be careful getting back there. You'll have to go in the front door, out the garage and back through the front door. Your filter should keep you cloaked, but don't…."

"I know, don't draw undue attention to myself," she finished, standing up. "Doctor, what kind of reconnaissance do you expect me to do?"

He sat back and thought. "The only thing I can think of is… maybe talk to Diane."

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's time to start getting aggressive," he decided. "We don't have time to spare her feelings anymore – we need to find out what she knows. She might be harbouring a memory that's useful to us, she might drop any little bit of info… she may even know all about McPhail and the affair, and just still be thinking that she can protect her family's secrets. Protect her mum from judgement."

"Okay," she said. "You've got it. I'll get out of her whatever she's got. I'll give it my level best, anyhow."

"I'll stay with George into tomorrow, or until I work out what's going on," he said. "One way or another, I'll meet you in the TARDIS console room at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, 15 September, 2008. When you get back there tonight, it should still be Sunday evening."

"Gotcha."

"If I'm not there by 9:00, you might need to come and find me," he said. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit coat and pulled out the sonic screwdriver. He handed it to her. "If anything happens, like the portals close somehow, aim it at the console on setting 3189, and it will move the TARDIS to 13 May, 1966 at 9:00 a.m…. still in the Handlers' backyard. I am assuming that we're on a timeline that can be accessed with the TARDIS."

"Great," she mused. "Otherwise, what? You'll be trapped in the 1960's again, only without Sally Sparrow to the rescue."

"Well, Martha, we don't have forever to work all these things out…"

"I know, I know," she said.

"Oh, and use setting 2500 to unlock the Handlers' front door. In any year you should need to."

"Okay. Thanks."

"So, I'll see you in about forty-two years?" he asked her.

"Yeah," she said, bending for a kiss, then exiting the bowling alley.

* * *

Martha snuck through the Handlers' home while they were having dinner. They noticed the front door opening, only about 10 seconds after it had opened, and 16-year-old Diane frowned at it, then walked over and shut it. Her two younger siblings were pushing their chicken around their plate, whining as though they were being asked to eat cement. Their father was scolding them, and Lillian had her head against her fist and was staring blankly at the wall.

Just as Martha carefully slid open the garage door, about six inches away from where Diane's sister sat protesting her dinner, John Handler asked his wife, "Honey, what's for dessert?"

Again, about ten or fifteen seconds after she had slipped into the garage, Martha heard John say, "There's another door open. I wonder if there's a window ajar someplace, a draft causing pressure in the house to…" and then the door slammed shut, and she was alone in the dark garage.

From there, she eased open the carport door, only as much as absolutely necessary for her to crawl out, then she eased it back down again. She then went back through the front door and found an empty house on a cool evening in 2008. Once again, she went through the garage and walked into the UNIT truck to obtain Diane Wesson's phone number.

* * *

They met in a Greek deli that Diane had chosen, a few miles away from Lillian's house. Martha's senses were assailed with the scent of Mediterranean spices, and she realised that she was famished.

Diane was sipping a white wine, and almost immediately a waitress appeared looking for Martha's drink order. She followed Diane's lead and ordered wine as well, thinking it would be good to have something to soften this very difficult conversation.

"Thanks for meeting me," Martha said.

"No problem," Diane said, nodding.

Martha asked for a quick recommendation from the menu, and Diane suggested a noodle dish that came with a salad, so Martha decided upon it. They waited until the waitress returned and took their dinner order before plunging into the topic at-hand.

"Diane," Martha said, gently. "As you know, the Doctor and I have been doing our own sort of research into what's going on with your mother's house."

"I do know that," Diane said, darkly. "But I don't know what that means."

"Well, has anyone told you what's actually going on? The time anomaly?"

"Not really. I heard someone say it, but it sounded like such nonsense…"

"It's not nonsense, trust me."

"Well, what does that mean, a _time anomaly_?"

"Just what it sounds like," Martha said. She took a deep breath and tried to channel the Doctor. She thought back to all the times when he had talked to her about the nature of time, how it is malleable and almost sentient in its own right. "People think of time as a… non-entity. Just something we exist upon, like air or gravity, or even less-tangible than that. We're born and we die, and things happen in-between. But time is much more concrete than that. It's a thing. It's a being. It breathes."

"It breathes?" Diane asked, incredulous. " _Time breathes_?"

"In a manner of speaking," Martha answered. "And more importantly, it thinks. It makes decisions. It can manipulate, and be manipulated."

Diane looked at her with suspicion and a hint of fear. Finally, she squinted her eyes and asked, "Are you for real?"

"Completely," Martha said sobrely. "Diane, you _must_ know, on some level, that something is happening in that house, having to do with phenomena that cannot be explained with science as we know it, in the twenty-first century. You saw him yourself, didn't you? George McPhail showed up at the door with a package, didn't he? The postman who died whatever number of years ago, still trying to make contact and get that parcel into your mother's hands."

"Yes, I saw him," Diane confessed, taking a hearty sip of her wine.

"And UNIT was called in because… well, who else are you gonna call? There are no Ghostbusters out there in real life, so the other next-level weirdness trackers deal with aliens. But when _even they_ can't work out what's going on, when there's something beyond their ken, they call the Doctor."

"Your friend. The Doctor."

"Yes."

"Who is he? Why is _he_ so special?"

Martha contemplated her answer. "He's… clever. And he's got experience. He has abilities that no-one else has."

"What, like a psychic?"

"A little bit, but…" Martha stumbled. "You know what? You're probably better-off not knowing the Doctor's story. Just know that he's an operative that UNIT turns to, a specialist of sorts, who can deal with… well, intangible phenomena, like time anomalies."

"He's awfully young to have so many credentials under his belt," Diane said, suspiciously.

"The Doctor is, in his way, his own brand of time anomaly. His appearance is deceiving."

Diane was quiet for a moment, and contemplative. "You're more than just his friend, aren't you?"

"Yes," Martha told her, then quickly changed the subject. "And honestly, there are no ghosts – at least not in this case. What you saw was not an apparition of George McPhail – that was the man himself, in the flesh. What you saw was time periods overlapping. He knocked on your mother's door in 1966, but it's 2008 inside the house."

"What?" Diane spat.

"Have you noticed the front windows of your mother's house, Diane?"

"What about them?"

"The one on the right shows exactly what you'd expect: the house across the street with the Ford Fairlane, kind of beat-up at this stage, and the UNIT truck parked out next to the driveway. But the window on the left gives a completely different picture. It shows a brand-new Fairlane. No UNIT truck. A lady next door who seems to enjoy pruning her roses…"

"Mrs. Lafferty? She's been gone since… well, 1990 or so."

"I saw her yesterday. Through the window to the left of your mother's front door."

"You couldn't have," Diane decided, with finality. "Just couldn't have."

"I promise you, it is. We can go there right now, and I will show you…"

"You're putting me on!" she insisted. "You and the Doctor and those UNIT people! You're trying to… I don't know… get something from me, or my mother."

"Like what?" Martha wondered.

"I don't know!"

Martha let a few moments pass, let Diane's feathers get settled again, before asking, "Has anyone asked you for any money for these services?"

"No," Diane admitted.

"Has anyone asked for… anything?"

"Not really."

"Didn't you see something on Thursday afternoon that you could not explain? Something seemingly paranormal that you had previously thought was impossible?"

"Yes."

"Well, I am offering you a few answers, if not all of them. Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Yes."

"Then can you please give me the benefit of the doubt?"

Diane sighed and stared at her hands in her lap. "Fine." She crossed her arms obstinately over her chest, crossed her thin legs and waited for impact.

"Thank you. There are some things I need to tell you, Diane, and you're not going to like them. But I swear I will not lie to you, nor tell you anything I'm not sure of."

"Okay."

"And I am going to need you to be truthful with me, because it's not an exaggeration to say, the world is at stake." After a pause, she asked, "Do you believe me?"

"I don't know," Diane said.

"It sounds daft, but… events surrounding the time-fold - or whatever you want to call it that makes 1966 meet up with 2008 in someone's living room - are connected with the thing that's been happening all over the planet with the computers. Firewalls went down, and something ugly got in. We don't know the full relationship between it and the time-convergence yet, but we do know that in the next day or so, the Earth will be under attack via computerised channels. It will be anarchy. The end of life as we know it." Martha spoke in a very measured tone, very evenly. "You might have a piece of information about your family that could stop it happening."

"Wow. If nothing else, you have a flair for the dramatic."

"You haven't heard the dramatic bit yet," Martha said.

"So what's the dramatic bit?"

"All right, here goes," Martha said, gearing up for the blow. "Diane, your mother and George McPhail had an affair."

"Excuse me?"

"And a fairly torrid one, at that," Martha extended.

Diane opened her mouth in what looked to be righteous indignation, and for several seconds, did not seem able to speak. "How can you even say such a thing? I won't listen to this… you have no proof!"

She moved to slide out of her side of the booth, but Martha grabbed her hand. "Diane, I swear it's the truth. I saw it with my own eyes."

"Saw _what_ , exactly?"

"I saw them together. I told you, time is overlapping. I know you always use the garage to go in and out, but if you walk out the _front door_ of your mother's house, you'll find that you're in May of 1966. And from there, if you re-enter through the garage, you'll be back in the house… in 1966. I've done that. Twice. Both times, I saw your mother with the postman."

"And when you say _with_ , you mean…"

"I think you know what I mean."

"Well… how can you be sure it was them?"

"You gave me a photo of your mother at that age," Martha reminded her. "And the Doctor and I met George McPhail yesterday at ten-past-twelve when he came to call, trying once again to deliver that package."

"Is there any way that their actions could have been misconstrued?" Diane asked, her voice quavering a bit.

"No, Diane," Martha told her. "I'm sorry."

Diane's jaw tightened and she stared past Martha. For a long minute, she just fixed her gaze on some point on a distant wall. "You're not screwing with me, are you?"

"No," Martha said. "I would never."

There was another long silence while Diane let it sink in.

"Okay. So they had an affair," Diane said at last, gathering herself. She sipped her wine then steeled herself. "So what do you want from me?"

"McPhail is on a two-day loop. Day-two is when he knocks on the door with a parcel for your mum. But on day-one, they are intimate with each other sometime in the late afternoon, and afterwards, your mother tries to end it."

"Tries to?"

"He doesn't accept it," Martha explained. "He's resistant and bitter. He throws a bunch of different semi-misogynistic mind games at her… calls her names, debases her a bit, turns on some seductive action, and then tells her he loves her. Is fairly adamant about that love bit, actually."

"Really? George McPhail was in love with my mother?"

"If I had to guess, I'd say there were plenty of strong feelings to go around," Martha qualified. "But your mother holds her ground. She insists that she needs to be a good example to you, Diane, and honour her commitment to her family."

"Good for her," Diane commented flatly.

"That's sort of where you come in."

"Me? What the hell would I know about it? What was it – 1966? I was just a kid for God's sake!"

"I know but… Diane, can you remember _anything_ about that time, having to do with the postman? You saw him on the weekends sometimes… did he ever say or do anything unusual?"

Diane chuckled. "I wouldn't know from unusual!"

"Did you ever notice him talking with your mum?"

"Yes, lots of times! Didn't think anything about it. Never knew what they talked about… although this little revelation has put all of that in a new light."

"Did he ever… I don't know, mention any family? Particular friends?"

"Not to me!"

"Did he ever deliver a parcel to your house that had no addresses on? Just plain brown paper?"

"Not that I can think of. Why would he do that?"

"Can you remember _anything_ about that day? 13 May, 1966? It would have been a Friday. Friday the 13th. You were sixteen."

Diane sighed. "Of course not. It was over forty years ago. Do you remember what you were doing on May 13 of _this_ year, off the top of your head?"

"I suppose not." After a few beats, Martha asked, "Did you ever notice him talking to your father?"

"Yes," Diane answered. "They were chums, I thought."

"Did your dad ever mention him, say, at the dinner table?"

"I suppose he might have," Diane shrugged. "We considered Mr. McPhail a friend of the family. It would not have been at all unusual for my father to mention him in passing… at the dinner table, in the car, wherever."

Martha sat back in the booth, rather crestfallen. She was hoping to grab onto some tiny tidbit that would give them the key, the connection… but Diane had nothing.

In the meantime, their food came, and for a few minutes, they ate in silence. Martha was grateful for the brief respite, actually.

"Diane, are you _positive_ you didn't know about your mother and McPhail?" she asked.

"I swear, I had no idea," said Diane, swallowing a bite of her food. "Though, I did know that he had a thing going with one of the ladies who lived around the corner… over on Newport Street. The hens used to talk."

"Really?"

Diane nodded. "My friend Barbara lived across the street when we were growing up, and… one time when I went over to visit, when I arrived, I heard her mother gossiping over the fence. _That George McPhail's at it again – quite the charmer, still comes to call on that pretty blonde!_ "

"I don't suppose you remember her name? Or the address?"

"Her name was… oh, what was it, let's see… she sold Mary Kay products, so she was always dolled-up. Harlan? Hartford? Hartmeyer?"

Martha's heart sped up and began thumping like mad. "Was it Hargreaves?" she asked, her voice coming out dry and strained.

"Yes, Hargreaves. Jean Hargreaves!"

"Janet."

"Janet Hargreaves! Yes!" exclaimed Diane with an unduly delighted smile. "How'd you know that?"

* * *

It was around three o'clock in the morning when Martha was awakened by someone crawling into bed beside her.

"Hi," she groaned, turning over to face him.

"Hi," he whispered, pulling the covers up around himself. "Shh. No. Go back to sleep. I didn't want to wake you."

"But you did, so… how's our friend George? Is he seeking counselling?"

The Doctor rested his elbow on the pillow and his head on his fist. "No. He's building a bomb."

* * *

 **Don't forget to tell me what you're thinking!**


	11. Chapter 11

**If you'll remember, in the last chapter we learned that George McPhail, after having _intimate relations_ with Lillian, and being sort of rejected by her, goes to a bowling alley with some friends, then goes home and builds a bomb.**

 **So... this is draft #4 of this chapter! I finally just decided to take the plunge... I have to commit, damn it.**

 **Poor Lillian, I say.**

 **Hope you enjoy!**

* * *

XI

"A bomb?" she asked, incredulous. "Like, the kind that explodes?"

"Yep," he said, calmly. "Judging by the proportions of chemicals he put in, I'd say that it's enough to completely take out the Handlers' house, and parts of the houses next door. I guess it's saying something that he doesn't want to bring down the whole neighbourhood… just Lillian. And himself."

"Oh my God," she breathed. "So, _that's_ what's in the package? This whole _fixed point_ business hinges on a bomb?"

The Doctor nodded.

"Did you get sick again when you saw him do it?" she wondered.

He nodded once more. "I had to leave or risk being seen. When I left, he was rigging a flash point that would ignite when he opens the parcel. He cut off the fuse so it will burn down in about five seconds, and spark some carefully-mixed household chemicals."

"He thinks he can't have her, so he'd rather just kill her, and also himself?"

He shrugged. "I've been there. Not so long ago."

"You were a rogue Time Lord," she spat. "He's just an overgrown adolescent with… wait, how does he know how to do that? It's not like they teach that stuff in high school science classes, do they? And he hasn't got internet."

"Disturbed brilliance comes in all types of wrapping, Martha," the Doctor mused. "If he excelled at chemistry at school, then he'd know the theoretical combinations to give him the desired effect. He could work them out, anyway. Or maybe he worked with explosives in the army or something."

"But he's clearly clever!" she exclaimed. "What's he doing as a postman? He could be working on pharmaceuticals research, or even engineering!"

"Martha," he scolded. "Don't be a snob. Besides, all the clever types at this point in American history are used as tools in the Cold War."

* * *

The Doctor's revelations would not allow them to sleep. They were up for the next few hours talking, ruminating, fretting, speculating, and the like. Eventually, they gave up and just went to the kitchen for coffee, to keep the discussion going. Martha, of course, revealed to him that McPhail had had not only an affair with Lillian Handler, but also a relationship with Janet Hargreaves, mother of Barry Hargreaves, aged forty, who unknowingly ushered in a possible Armageddon in the form of unravelled firewalls.

Though, they didn't necessarily continue talking about George, Lillian, Diane, Janet and Barry all night. They talked about their own experiences with love, infidelity, violence, loss, fixed points, scandal… and of course, their experiences with each other. They re-hashed the similarities between their relationship and that of George and Lillian, and reassured one another that choices and communication would ultimately save them.

The conversation meandered, to be sure, because one way or another, there was no returning to sleep for Martha. After hearing that George McPhail was planning on blowing up the woman he claimed to love, her eyes were wide open and the rest of her was wired.

"Well, the sun is probably up by now," she sighed. "What do we do now?"

He sighed. "I'm going to have to talk to Lillian. I'm not sure what I need to know yet, but… I'll know it when I hear it. I hope."

* * *

They obtained Diane's address from the UNIT truck, then borrowed the Jeep again, and set out to knock on the door of Lillian's current not-so-secret hideout.

"Hi, you two," Diane said, with confusion when she opened the door. "What are you doing here? Is something the matter?"

"We need to talk to your mother, Mrs. Wesson," the Doctor said.

Diane's face hardened. "What about?"

"About 13 May, 1966."

"Absolutely not," said Diane. "Under no circumstances."

"Diane, remember what I said yesterday about the planet being at stake?" asked Martha. "Well, that still holds true. She almost certainly has information that we need…"

"Dr. Jones," Diane interrupted, and then she stepped out on the front porch, pulling the door shut behind her. She whispered with a hissing intensity. "My mother is in her eighties. She's already had a terrible shock seeing _that man_ again, and thinking her house is haunted. And given what you've told me, it's probably not just the 'haunting' that's causing her anguish. The last thing she needs is a couple of judgemental strangers…"

"We are not here to judge, Mrs. Wesson," the Doctor said. "We're here to save the world."

"Diane?" a voice said from inside. Just then, an elderly lady with well-rendered white hair appeared, and spoke to them through the screen door. "Who's come to visit?" she asked.

She was forty years older, but the spark in her eyes was unmistakable.

"Good morning, Mrs. Handler," the Doctor said with a smile. "I'm the Doctor, and this is my Companion, Martha Jones. We're working on the anomaly occurring in your home."

"Don't you dare, Doctor," Diane said, pulling on the Doctor's shoulder and trying to usher him down the front steps. "Just turn around and go back to that UNIT truck. You'll have to save the world some other way."

"Save the world?" Lillian chuckled. "Are you a doctor, as well as a Messiah?"

The Doctor shook off Diane's hands. "What would you say if I told you that I'm actually a time-traveller?"

"I'd say… you may have my seat on the bus to the asylum, sir," the old lady responded, good-naturedly.

The Doctor chuckled amiably. "Well, fair enough. Listen…"

"Mother, the Doctor and his Companion were just leaving," Diane said. "Weren't you?"

"Actually no, we weren't," Martha interjected. "We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions."

"About my house?" Lillian wondered.

"Yes," Martha said, slowly, carefully. "And some of the things that happened in it."

"Like what?"

All four were quiet for a few moments, seemingly frozen in an awkward moment. Diane inspected the visages of the Doctor and Martha, and seemed to read something in them. Something like supplication or worry, dread and desperation. But also, some genuine kindness. She sighed in resignation.

"Mother," she said. "The thing in your house, the haunting, as you call it… it centres around George McPhail. When Martha says, _things that happened in the house_ , I think you know what she means." Diane said this with a compassionate, yet serious, gaze at her mother.

Lillian looked at her with surprise. "Just what are you implying, young lady?" She seemed to steady herself against the doorjamb.

"You know what I'm saying," Diane said, still without any hardness. She was trying to mirror the Doctor and Martha's expressions.

Her mother gazed at her with jaw agape for a few moments. Then she crossed her arms obstinately over her chest. "Well. No, Diane. I don't think I do."

"Mother, I know you – I've known you for fifty-eight years. I can tell. I can see it in your eyes," Diane said. She turned to Martha. "I have to admit, I didn't fully believe it until right this second."

Martha nodded. "I understand."

To her mother, Diane said, "I know how you act when you're genuinely confused. This is not genuine confusion. You know exactly what I mean. George McPhail. Some things that happened in your house."

Lillian continued to look at her through the screen door with a hardened gaze, but over the next few moments, the hardness turned to sadness. Martha and the Doctor had seen first-hand that Lillian had been terrified of Diane finding out about the affair, and she had thought she'd been in the clear, but today, that security died. Martha felt a momentary pang of guilt for having been the one to spill her secret.

But then, "And you know what, Mom?" Diane said, planting her hands on her hips. "It makes perfect sense."

Her mother said nothing, only continued to stare rather stubbornly, with that stony, forlorn expression.

"What does?" the Doctor asked in her stead. "What makes perfect sense, Diane?"

Diane turned to him and said, "My father died nineteen years ago, of liver cancer. When he was on his way out, one day when I was visiting him at the hospital and we were alone, he took my hand and said goodbye to me. He said he didn't want there to be anything left unsaid, he didn't want me to get a call in the middle of the night that he had passed on, without his having looked me in the eye and said a proper goodbye."

"I'm sorry," the Doctor muttered, with softness in his voice. "But… closure. That's good, isn't it?"

"Yes, it was good. It's something my brother and sister never got because they were living in the far-flung reaches of planet Earth at that time… but that's not why I'm telling you this story. The point is, as part of his goodbye speech…" Diane trailed off. She turned and looked at her mother. "… he said something like, 'your mother has her daemons, Diane.'"

"Daemons? He said that?" Lillian asked, incredulous.

Diane nodded. She looked at her mother with wonder, memories coming back, as if unable to believe what she had once heard. "He said, he wasn't the easiest man to be married to, especially for someone like you. He said that you always needed something he couldn't provide – how did he put it? A spark? A blaze? A fire, of some kind?"

Lillian shook her head and asked, "How could he say that to you?"

"Is it true?" asked Diane.

The Doctor and Martha exchanged glances, knowing, of course, that it was. Lillian clearly never found the kind of _spark_ she needed with her husband, and they had seen the manifestation of it, in living colour. They both nervously wondered how, if at all, she would respond.

In response, Lillian chuckled bitterly, and chose to look away from her daughter, and their guests. But she didn't leave the scene – she stayed to listen.

Diane continued. "But he also said that I should forgive you for being human, imperfect, flawed, like all of us. Because whatever you may have done, you always loved your family, and gave up so much for us. Mom, I never had any context for what he was saying. To be honest, I thought he was a little out-of-it with the pain meds he was on, so I sort of discounted it, never gave it much thought, but… now I get it."

She still did not have judgement in her voice. Martha admired this.

Lillian's face was now distorted into shock. "He _knew_?" she asked, her voice shaking and breaking a bit.

Diane shrugged. "Apparently."

"Oh my God," Lillian exclaimed. "Oh my God, oh my God." She began to sob, and turned away from the screen door. She moved down the entrance hall, whimpering.

"Sorry," the Doctor whispered to Diane.

"It's okay," she whispered back. She opened the door, and then held it open for her guests, and ushered them inside.

The entrance hall led straight away from the door, past a staircase, and into a kitchen that was more like an atrium. The floors were an uneven, but attractive, red ceramic tile. Two walls, plus most of the ceiling, were made of windows. Lillian navigated the two steps down into the breakfast nook with relative ease, then sat down at the table and removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes, as she continued to cry.

Martha and the Doctor weren't sure what to do next.

Diane moved into the kitchen, and rooted around in a cabinet for a few moments, coming out with a kettle. Then she asked, "Would the two of you like some coffee or tea?"

"Either is fine," the Doctor said. "Whatever is handy."

"Take milk in your tea?"

"Erm, sure," he said. "If you have it."

Their voices seemed to bring Lillian round.

"I'm sorry," she said, trying to gather herself. She pulled some tissues from her sleeve and wiped her eyes. She put her glasses back on, and gestured to the two seats across from her. "Please have a seat. What did you say your names were, again?"

"I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor, as the two sat down. "And this is Martha."

She shook hands with them both, and said, "Nice to meet you. I apologise – I lost myself there for a few minutes. I just… I had no idea that my husband knew about what I had done. I thought I'd been able to protect him from it."

"Don't you mean, protect yourself?" Diane asked, with the first hint of anger or judgement she'd shown.

"No," Lillian answered. "I didn't care about myself. I didn't care what would happen to me – I figured I deserved whatever might come my way. I wanted to protect _him_. From the truth, from the fact that as good a man as he was, he just wasn't enough for me. From the fact that someone he loved and trusted could betray him so hideously. I wanted to protect all of you from that."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I didn't know until yesterday, Mom," said Diane, having softened again. "Martha told me."

"Well, how did your Dad find out?" Lillian wondered.

"How the heck should I know?" Diane asked.

Lillian turned her attention to the Doctor. "Are you working on a way for me to be able to move back in, without being tormented by my own chequered past?" she asked.

The Doctor's hearts sank, and his Time Lord stomach turned over at the same time. He chose his words carefully, so as not to cause more illness. "If I can find any way to make that work, you can bet I'll do it."

The lady nodded. Then, to Martha, "So, how did _you_ know about my relationship with George?" Her hands were folded, business-like, on the table. She was looking at Martha with an inquisitiveness that belied the scandalous topic.

"Well, it's like the Doctor said before: we're time-travellers. We've been back in time, Mrs. Handler, and seen things that… well, point to an affair," Martha explained.

"You know, maybe my daughter told you that I do believe in mediums and things like that, but there's no need to be facetious. I'm not senile."

"I swear it's the truth," said Martha, seriously. "Sorry."

Lillian sighed. "Don't be sorry," she said, patting Martha's hand. "In any case, however it is you found out, it's my fault, not yours."

"Anyway," the Doctor said. "I suppose you could say that the past has some unfinished business to attend to. We need to know about 13 May, 1966. I don't suppose that date rings a bell?"

Lillian shook her head. "No. Should it?"

The Doctor looked at Martha for help. This conversation needed to be handled delicately, and he wondered if Lillian would have an easier time discussing with another woman, rather than with a strange man.

Gently, Martha said, "It was the day after you tried to end it with George."

"Which time?" asked Lillian.

"Which time?" Martha repeated.

"Yeah, which time? I tried to end it with him at least three or four times, but… well… I was weak."

"You are not weak. He was obstinate, possessive and persuasive," Martha said, defensively. "And frankly, a bit frightening."

"Well, yes," Lillian agreed.

Martha thought hard. She called up into memory the awful exchange between younger Lillian and George that they had witnessed, and tried to pull from it something that the lady would be sure to recall. She balked. "The time I'm talking about… George said some right nasty things to you."

"He always did," Lillian confessed. "He had a filthy mouth. That's one of the things I liked about him."

"Oh, Mother!" Diane exclaimed.

Martha ignored Diane's comment. "Okay, then," she said, thinking. "You said you wanted to end it because you were afraid Diane would find out. You said you wanted to become a better role model to her, that if she knew…"

"She wouldn't be able to understand that I still love her, and the rest of my family, even if I'm cheating on her father," Lillian finished.

"Yes."

"And George couldn't handle not being in control, so he called me a slut, and threatened me," Lillian continued. She stared at her hands folded on the table, and spoke softly.

"Threatened you, how?" Diane asked, bringing a tray with four mugs and a steaming kettle. She sat down beside her mother and looked at her with worry.

Lillian shrugged. "He just said that he'd be back the next day, and that if I didn't come around to seeing that we belong together, or whatever he was trying to convince me of, there would be consequences."

"What sort of consequences?" Diane wondered.

"He didn't say, Diane," said Lillian. "And I wasn't there the next day when he came by. I mean, I'm assuming he came by – he was the mailman, it was his job. But if he rang the bell expecting to take me to task… well, then he was disappointed."

"What happened after that?" the Doctor wanted to know.

"Well, nothing. We didn't get our mail for a few days," she said. "But when he did decide to show up again, we acted like nothing ever happened. Like we never fell out."

"So you just… _resumed_ your relationship at that point?" Martha asked.

"Yes," said Lillian. "He came knocking on Monday afternoon and did what he usually did… and I just couldn't say no to him."

"This continued for how long?" Martha wondered.

"Oh… another year or so. Maybe closer to eighteen months. Definitely into 1967. Maybe even into '68."

"He didn't threaten you again?"

"No," Lillian said. "But I always saw volatility in his eyes, anger just below the surface. I don't think it really had anything to do with me - he was just sort of a disturbed man. It was exciting, and frightening."

"How did it finally end?"

"His route got changed," Lillian sighed. "The Postal Service reorganised the neighbourhood boundaries and reassigned the postmen to different areas. Probably made the routes larger so that they could lay off some carriers and cut costs – that's what my husband thought."

"And you never saw George again?" asked Martha.

"Very seldom," said Lillian. "His final day delivering on our street was a Saturday, and my husband and I were out planting flowers. He gave John his phone number, and thanked us both for being such friendly and kind postal customers, asking us to keep in touch. I called once, just to say hello, and after that, he called me about once a month, maybe more. For years. He'd still tell me he loved me, but didn't make any attempt to rekindle anything physical. On two separate Sundays in the 70's, we met for coffee… but that was it. The affair had to end, I suppose because he wasn't working nearby any longer. There was no time for us."

"Just as well, Mom," Diane said, in response to Lillian's wistful expression.

"Yes," Lillian agreed, patting Diane's knee. "Just as well. And then, one day in 1978, he called and said he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer. I visited him once in the hospital, then saw his obituary in the paper the following spring, so Diane and I went to the funeral. And that was it."

"Okay, that's weird," Diane said. "Because you say they changed his route in 1967, or maybe early '68 or so?"

"Yes," Lillian said. "After that, Mr. Marcum was our postman, don't you remember?"

"Well, yeah, vaguely, but… you say Mr. McPhail wasn't delivering in our neighbourhood anymore after that?"

"So?"

"Barbara's mother was still talking about him after his route changed," Diane said. "Remember Barbara who lived across the street?"

"Of course," said Lillian. "Her father still lives there. Still drives that God-awful mint-green Ford Fairlane."

"But Barbara's mom gossiped with her friends about Mr. McPhail and that Avon lady around the corner."

"What Avon lady around the corner?"

"Don't you remember? The blonde? The really pretty one? She almost always wore a red or pink suit and high heels? She lived in that house all by herself, and everyone wondered how she could afford that without a husband? Well, the answer was, she was an Avon lady… a really successful one."

Lillian looked at Diane with wide eyes and a sea of trepidation. "I have no idea what you're talking about." This time, Lillian was genuinely confused, and everyone could see it.

"Sorry, Mom, but you weren't the only one George was… you know. What was her name?" Diane asked Martha.

"Janet Hargreaves," Martha answered.

"Yeah, Hargreaves," Diane said. "You really don't remember her? She was tough to miss! The dads in the neighbourhood all knew who she was!"

"And she and George…" Lillian began, her voice shaking.

"Yeah!" Diane answered, with no sensitivity. "And a lot of people knew about it!"

"And you're sure it was after 1967? _After_ his route changed?" Lillian wondered, still shaking.

"Pretty sure, Mom. Barbara and I had a falling-out during junior high, and didn't become friends again until late in senior year."

"So you're saying…" Lillian said, anger rising, getting to her feet. "His route shifted over to Newport Way, one block from us? He was _still in the neighbourhood_ every day?"

"That's sort of the way it looks," Diane shrugged.

"And he let me believe that he wasn't working in the area anymore, and just abruptly ended a two-year relationship with me, with almost no notice?" She was supporting herself against the table and the back of the chair.

"Mother, sit down," Diane said, reaching out to her, trying to help.

Lillian batted her hands away. "He was a block away, six days a week, fucking some tarted-up, makeup-hawking blonde, and calling me once a month to check up on me? Tell me he _loved_ me? Probably just to make sure I was still missing him?"

"Mom, calm down…" Diane told her, now trying to pry her hand away from the back of the chair, so she'd sit.

Lillian shouted, finally sitting, "That asshole!"

"Okay, look," the Doctor interjected. "I think we're getting a bit off-track here…"

"That flaming, stinking, foul, twitching, asshole!" She slammed her fist down on the table, jostling the whole table.

"Wow!" the Doctor exclaimed steadying his tea. "Mrs. Handler, I'm sorry, but can we please get back to the task at-hand?"

"What task?" Lillian snapped.

"The mystery surrounding your house," the Doctor said. He frowned deeply, and squinted at her. Martha could see wheels turning. Then he said, "I don't suppose the name Olivia Paulsen means anything to you?"

"No, who is that? _Another_ one of George's damned daytime conquests?"

"No, she's a psychiatrist," said the Doctor.

Like before, Martha had basically forgotten about the purportedly brilliant doctor whose work and legacy had, in some reality, ensured that countless genius-level autism patients achieved extraordinary, hugely historic feats in science and technology. Martha wondered if, since Paulsen didn't exist in this paradigm, her brain just couldn't retain information about her.

The players were gelling in Martha's mind – even the Hargreaves. Naturally, this was at a slower pace than the Doctor, but she'd been able to grasp them all. Except poor Olivia. The Doctor kept pulling her name out of the mothballs, and surprising Martha with it.

The Doctor was saying, "Dr. Olivia Paulsen? I only ask because her maiden name was Handler. Thought she might be related to you. She'd have been born in 1971. No?"

"We don't have any shrinks in the family," said Diane. "Why? What's she got to do with it?"

"Not sure," he sighed, frustrated. He seemed to shake off a daze then, and said, "Never mind. What about the 13th of May? Mrs. Handler, the day after George threatened you, you said you weren't home when he came by. Where were you?"

"How the hell should I know?" she asked. "It was forty-two years ago."

"I'm going to have to ask you to _think_ ," he said. "I know it was a long time ago. I know those memories are difficult, but if you want to set things right in your house, I'm going to need to know _why_ you weren't there when the postman rang the bell that day."

Reluctantly, Lillian sat back down, and seemed to immerse herself in thought.

Lillian stared off at a point in the lower corner of the room for a minute or two. Eventually, she shut her eyes tight and said, "I was at a bake sale."

"A bake sale?" asked the Doctor. "What's that?"

"At my son's school," said Lillian. "Whenever they needed to raise money for something, a bunch of the mothers made cakes and cookies and whatnot, and held a sale. I made a chocolate cake. The same kind I made for you UNIT folks."

"Wow, Mom, how would you remember something like that?"

Lillian looked forlorn. "At that time, I always felt self-conscious when I went to neighbourhood events. I constantly wondered if anyone knew… about George, I mean. That day, I remember a man… well, I'd never seen him before, and he scared me a little."

"How so?" asked the Doctor.

"He didn't fit into… anything about it, really. He was wearing this jet-black, expensive Italian suit and a fedora. He had dark hair, five-o'clock shadow. And he had these piercing eyes, like he could see through me, and he never quite smiled nor frowned. He always just had this smirk… like he knew something I didn't."

"Did you speak to him?"

"He bought a piece of cake from me, just as we were packing up to close the bake sale, and then he started asking me questions."

"Like what?"

"Usual stuff," she said. "How are you, nice weather, eh? Where'd you find the recipe for this cake? I tried to shake him off, but he was persistent. Just wanted to ask questions. Wanted to talk. I didn't want to cause a fuss, so I just stood and talked to him, until he saw fit to let me go."

The Doctor, Martha and Diane were studying Lillian avidly now, hanging on her every word.

She continued, "I was self-conscious as always. I wondered if maybe he was a friend of George's, checking up on me – I hadn't forgotten that I'd been threatened. I wondered if he was from the school board and was going to ask me not to set foot on school grounds anymore, for reasons of morality or some such… I thought lots of far-fetched, paranoid things."

"Who was he?" the Doctor wanted to know.

"I have no idea," she said. "I only remember him because, like I said, he was so out-of-place there. And I was extra-sensitive that day. I felt like my sin and humiliation were written on my face, and everyone knew. My scarlet A. So when a shadowy man comes out of nowhere and just wants to _talk_ to me for ten minutes… yes, it was memorable."

"Mrs. Handler," the Doctor said. "Again, I know it was a long time ago, but can you recall what _time_ that was?"

"I can tell you that," Diane said. "Edwina Fallis always had its bake sales from nine to noon."

"Excuse me, who?" asked the Doctor.

"Edwina Fallis Elementary," Diane replied. "It's where my brother and sister went to grammar school, and they used to have bake sales all the time. The signs advertising the sale were up, all over the neighbourhood, at least once every quarter. I remember, nine to noon."

"So, do I have this right?" the Doctor asked Lillian. "You and the other mothers were packing up to leave, around noon. You were putting your wares in storage so as to take them home in the next few minutes, when a dark figure turned up and kept you from leaving."

"Well, yes, I suppose."

"Some creep basically forces you to stand about and talk to him for about ten minutes when you should have been heading back to your house."

"Yes."

"And when you arrived home, there was some post in your letter box – you had missed George's visit. Probably by just a few minutes."

"Probably."

The Doctor got to his feet abruptly. "Thank you, Mrs. Handler. You've been extremely helpful."

"What?" asked Lillian. "That's it?"

"Erm, yes," the Doctor said. "What you've just told me, it might be exactly the piece of the puzzle I needed to get the anomaly in your house under control."

"Really? The man with the dark suit was what you needed?"

"Yes," the Doctor told her. Then he realised what was about to happen. He reached out with sadness and offered his hands to Lillian. She took them. He looked into her eyes, and said, "Thank you. Really."

"No, thank _you_ ," she said with surprise.

Martha got to her feet now, watching the Doctor closely. He had some combination of regret and mania about him – like he was on a mission, but didn't like it.

When the Doctor made for the front door, she followed, trying to be as polite as possible as her partner led them very suddenly out into the September air.

Diane had trailed behind them, rather clumsily. "Be in touch?" she called out.

"Of course," Martha called back as she went round to the passenger's side of the UNIT Jeep.

When she shut the door, she barely had time to get strapped in before he peeled off the kerb like a bat out of hell.

* * *

 **This is a lot of information... just trying to tell the story of George and Lillian.**

 **Leave a review with whatever you're thinking. And/or PM me with questions, if you have them! :-)**


	12. Chapter 12

**Okay, here we go. I think some of you, according to the reviews, anyway, have worked out what might happen. *teeth gritted* Things are going to change fast now...**

 **Also, some context for how all of this applies to the planet and universe at-large.**

* * *

XII

No one said anything on the three-mile drive back to Lillian's house, until the Doctor turned the Jeep into Niagara street, then crossed Newport Way, and asked, contemplatively, "Martha, given all the rubbish that's up in the air – the time fold, the Rehengese invasion, George, Lillian, the Hargreaves family, Diane, the bake sale and the mysterious man, and all the other pieces of this blasted puzzle… what do you think the odds are that George McPhail is _not_ Barry Hargreaves' father?"

"Not good," she answered.

"That's what I think, too," he said. He parked the vehicle behind the UNIT truck, then pressed his forehead against the steering wheel. "Barry Hargreaves is forty years old. That means he was born in 1968."

"Right. The timeline fits, more or less. That's about when Diane said she was hearing about the postman shagging the Avon lady."

That was when Larry Fortis knocked on the driver's side window and scared the daylights out of both of them. They both yelled with a start, and Martha cursed.

The Doctor opened his door. "Blimey, Fortis," he said. "Forget physics – you should be in covert ops."

"Sorry, Doctor, no time for finesse," said Larry. "There's something you need to see."

The three of them jogged into the UNIT truck, which was buzzing with activity. Men and women in uniform were milling about everywhere, talking into phones, shouting at each other, just generally acting like there was a crisis in progress.

The Doctor's eyes were drawn to a television to the right of the door, where CNN was reporting on "The Situation in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles."

"Right now, the three largest electrical grids are completely out-of-commission in the four cities, and city officials are not able to tell us when they'll be coming back online," said a blonde on the screen. "It seems to be mysterious as to the cause, and as all of the connected operating systems are currently down as well, it will likely be hours before anyone is able to run any diagnostics. This crisis comes right on the heels of last week's anomalous global computer incident, in which most of the world's computers and electronic devices seemed to display symptoms of…"

"Well, at least they're savvy enough to realise that the two incidents are connected," the Doctor muttered. "Though I'd wager that they don't really want to believe it."

"It's starting early," said Martha. "Isn't it?"

"Yes! UNIT were prepared to deflect this attack, as of tomorrow. Not today!" Larry exclaimed.

"In the next half hour, I predict that the next wave of electrical grids will go out," the Doctor speculated, putting on his glasses and squinting at a graph of some sort, now on the screen, on CNN. "I don't know if that will be another circle of smaller grids in those same four cities, or if it will be the three largest grids in the next four largest cities in America."

"Are we thinking that, at that point, everyone will know it's not just a fluke?" Martha asked. "They'll start to realise there's a coordinated attack, when more and more stuff goes kerplooey, and no-one can get the first ones back online?"

"Yeah," the Doctor said gravely.

"We are totally unprepared!" Larry cried out, almost in supplication. "Colonel Compton won't admit it to you now because he fucked up the antidote code thing and basically put us in this position when we didn't need to be, but… we're in it deep! We need you."

"Yes, you do. You really, really do. Fortunately, at least in theory, I know how to fix it," the Doctor said. "Or unfortunately, depending upon who you are."

"Okay, good," Larry said. "What do we do?"

"Martha and I have a little trip to 1966 to make," the Doctor answered, turning back toward the door.

"Doctor, please don't think I don't trust you, but I just don't see how this thing with the Handler house and the naughty postman is connected with the Rehengese attack."

"Of course you don't," the Doctor said, calling out behind him, walking toward the house. "And there's no time to explain. Just suffice it to say that the naughty postman was very, very naughty."

"At least tell me how I can help!"

"I don't think you can! It's a two-person job. Any others would get in the way!"

"Fine," the physicist conceded. "Silly me, trying to horn in on the Doctor and Martha Jones." He had a smirk on his face.

A UNIT officer stuck his head out of the truck. "Three largest grids down in Atlanta and Philadelphia!"

"I'm on it!" the Doctor cried out, now moving through the Handlers' garage.

Martha squeezed Larry's hand, before jogging off the follow the Doctor.

* * *

To Martha's surprise, once inside Lillian's house, the Doctor went straight out the back, rather than walking through the front door.

"We're going in the TARDIS?" asked Martha. "Why?"

"Because when we're done with George and Lillian this time," he said, determinedly. "There will be no more portal, no more time anomaly in that house. If we want to get back, we'll need the TARDIS."

"How's that?"

He turned the key in the TARDIS door, and let them both inside.

"There will be no more house!" he practically shouted. "At least… no more of the _same_ house."

"Oh!"

"Because, Martha," he said, now tense and frantic, at the controls, in precisely his own element. "We already knew that George knocking on Lillian's door on Friday, 13 May, 1966 was a fixed point, and that it revolved around that package, yeah? Well, actually, the explosion is the fixed point."

"The explosion?"

"Yes! But it got averted. Somehow, some way, and for some un-bloody-fathomable reason, a man in a black suit distracted Lillian Handler just long enough to derail a fixed point, and make it so that the explosion doesn't occur, and history doesn't take its course. If we make it takes its course, then the time-fold ceases to be. Which is what we want."

Martha groaned a bit. She steadied herself on the console, realising now why it was that the Doctor seemed so solemn when he left Lillian the last time.

The Doctor flipped a bunch of switches, as he does, and threw the TARDIS into gear. It made its signature grinding sound for only about ten seconds, and the Doctor continued talking, though he was now dashing toward the door.

"Fixed points are called _fixed_ for a reason," he said, stopping at the door.

"I know, you've told me. They're static, stationary, they _must_ be. _Time itself_ wants them to be."

"Yes, exactly. Because their ensuing consequences are large enough to matter to the entire universe, to the whole of time and space. This is why they burn up my guts!"

"So it must take a massive amount of power to derail one!"

"It takes _effort_ ," said the Doctor, now talking a million miles per hour. "Because anyone _innocent,_ or not duly determined, would have been distracted by something else, or decided not to stop and talk. Time would have seen to it. But someone who knows, for whatever reason, that Lillian needs to be delayed by ten minutes in order to unravel a fixed point… that someone will give it their all and rail against anything that gets in their way. That person will see the distractors coming, and will try to avoid, or plough right through them."

Martha cursed under her breath. "Okay, so what happens now?"

He threw open the TARDIS door, and they found themselves across the street from a primary school, clearly in the same neighbourhood where Lillian Handler lived. There was no-one about, but cars from the 1950s and 60s lined the street, as there was an event today. They walked toward the school's main entrance.

"Fixed points have consequences. Big ones. Necessary ones. And a diverted fixed point has _dire_ consequences, sometimes just due to the lack of consequence. Although, in this case, the consequence was so dire, that during the week leading up to the day when the repercussions would be most gravely felt, _time_ began trying to right itself. It began trying to give us, give itself, give George McPhail more chances to get it back on track. That's why it felt like it was all culminating in something: Monday, 15 September, 2008, when the Rehengese invade the human race, and begin effectively to bring it to its knees. That is _not_ supposed to happen."

"What's supposed to happen?"

"You've been to the future, Martha. You've seen how the human race prevails! Remember what I said? You lot are indomitable!"

She smiled. "Okay, I've seen what happens three hundred trillion years from now, but what about the twenty second century? Twenty-third? What happens _instead_ of a Rehengese invasion, that gets us to that point?"

"Well… over the next century or two, humans make huge strides forward, especially in space travel," he said. "In about fifty years, there will be a colony on Mars.

"Really? Wow, that seems really soon!"

"It is, all things considered. It was designed by someone called Ketchum, who was…"

They stopped in the breezeway between the outer and inner doors of the school's main entrance and the Doctor seemed either in the midst of a meditation or a total brain blank.

"Who was what?"

"Robert Ketchum was the man who designed the facility on Mars where humans could survive for five years. Air filtration, water filtration, an ecosystem... Well, he _will_ be the man who designs it – he's not born until 2010. But he's labelled as developmentally disabled as a child, but is discovered and re-diagnosed by…"

"…Olivia Paulsen," Martha sighed. "Let me guess. She identifies his autism and treats him, helps him live out his potential, and he does something to help the human race spread its wings. Like you said."

"Yeah," he said, looking at her wide-eyed. "Like I said… her legacy project does absolutely enormous things."

Martha felt crippled. Once again, the Paulsen piece had been added to the chess board, and though she otherwise had all of the players straight, Dr. Paulsen threw her for a loop. She felt she could not, and should not, go forward with the execution of Lillian Handler until she knew more.

Fortunately, the Doctor was adept at processing aloud. He seemed to exert all of his energies with his brain now, and leaned against the brick wall beside where they were standing. He tugged at his hair, spoke wispily and stared at the ceiling. "If McPhail's bomb doesn't go off today, and he and Lillian go on living, he fathers Barry Hargreaves, an oddly intelligent, ironically autistic, son who will unwittingly usher in the undoing of the human race. And somehow, if that happens, Olivia Handler Paulsen never exists. But if the bomb goes off, killing McPhail and Lillian, then… ohhhh!"

"What? Somehow Lillian and George's deaths will facilitate Olivia Paulsen's birth?"

The Doctor looked at her with manic, wide eyes. "Yes! Well, not so much George's, but definitely Lillian's! This is why _time_ is desperate to fix things… that's where we come in."

"Fix things," Martha muttered. "Obsession and destruction and death."

He opened the door and walked into the front hallway, and Martha stepped in behind him. Immediately, just a little to the right, beside an archway leading to a hall full of classrooms, they saw a small table with multiple pieces of chocolate cake sitting on it, and Lillian Handler standing behind it. She was red-haired, beautiful, smiling, and wearing a smart pink dress. She was giving change to a lady who had just purchased a slice of cake, and thanking her.

"Oh, God," Martha said, her voice quavering. She stood and stared at Lillian with trepidation, and a faraway wistfulness.

"What's the matter?"

"We're leading a lamb to slaughter." She almost broke. She could feel tears coming behind her eyes.

"An apt metaphor," he said softly. "A lamb. A sacrifice to appease the powers that be. Are you okay with that? I mean… I could do this by myself."

"She could go on to have a long life, Doctor," Martha sighed. "Another forty-two years and four months, at least. And we're giving her _fifteen minutes._ She could see her kids grow up. She could travel and see things, and _have choices_. Blimey, I didn't realise until now how attached I've become to her. Both young and old, tragically flawed as she is."

"Martha, if she lives, then so does McPhail."

"And then Janet Hargreaves gives birth to the bringer of apocalypse, and for some reason, genius psychiatrist lady who saves humanity doesn't get born," Martha rattled off with irritation. "I get it. Let's just do this."

"Are you sure? Again, I could do it alone."

"I'm sure. I signed up for this," Martha said, steeling herself. "And I get why we're doing it."

"Good," he said, squeezing her hand.

"And I don't want you to have to shoulder this by yourself. You've done enough of that."

That was when they were interrupted by a chirpy woman who wondered if she could help them. Most likely, she was simply wondering what they were doing loitering by the front door of the school.

"Oh, just looking for…" the Doctor said. He glanced over her shoulder and said, "Ha! Chocolate cake. There it is, sweetie. Go ahead."

"Oh, how nice," Martha said, and approached the table where Lillian had begun place the slices of cake in a special carrier container. As she began walking forward, she saw something dark out of the corner of her eye. A man in black. Dark fedora, unshaven jowls, smirky face, and a totally incongruous manner. He was coming from the other direction, from down the hall.

Martha began to panic a bit. She and the man would reach Lillian at about the same time.

"Hello," a voice said, almost out of nowhere. It was the Doctor's voice. His tall body had come between Martha and the Man in Black. "I have the strangest feeling we've met before."

Martha concentrated hard, in order _not_ to listen to what was being said between the Doctor and the mysterious man.

"Erm, hi," Lillian said to her, somewhat distracted by the two men. "If you'd like a piece of cake, you're just in time. I'm packing up now."

"I'd love that," Martha said. "It looks absolutely wonderful!"

"Oh, I like your accent!" Lillian said. "From England?"

"Yes," Martha said, sheepishly.

"Always wanted to go there."

Martha almost said, "Maybe you will someday," but she knew that because of her and the Doctor's actions today, Lillian Handler would never make it to England, or anywhere outside this neighbourhood. A wave of sadness overcame her, and she had to fight hard to hold back tears.

The Man in Black had begun to back off from the Doctor. Martha reckoned that this had put him on alert, and the Doctor was advancing on him.

Trying to stay in-the-moment, Martha patted her pockets and said, honestly, "Only… I'm sorry, I haven't got any money."

Lillian picked up a plate and put it in Martha's hands. "Tell you what. Since you have such a lovely way of saying so, it's on me."

She smiled. "Are you certain?"

"Sure, why not?" Lillian said, swatting away the question. "The bake sale's basically over. What am I going to do with seven extra slices of chocolate cake? My kids are sick of it. In fact, would you like six more?"

"No, thanks," Martha said with a chuckle. "But in return, I'll help you clean up."

Lillian said, "Okay, fair enough."

As Martha began stacking little plates of cake into a special Tupperware carrier, she glanced up and saw the Doctor disappear with the Man in Black, through a door adjacent to the school entry way.

* * *

The Doctor had spotted the Man in Black right about the time Martha had. He followed Martha over to Lillian's table, and then slid into the man's line of sight before he could say anything to anyone.

"I have the strangest feeling we've met before," he said, with an affable smile.

The man protested, "Oh, no, I don't think so," with wide eyes, as he took two steps back from the Doctor. The man spoke with an American accent, though something in his manner of speech was more lilting than the local.

Having the man off-balance gave him a surge of confidence, so the Doctor stepped forward, advancing on him.

He set his features to unamused. "Well then, why do I feel this uncontrollable urge to pick you up by your lapels and toss you out the door with a swift kick to the small of your back?" the Doctor asked, hard as nails, his teeth nearly gritted.

"I have no idea!"

Tellingly, the man's eyes flitted over to where Martha and Lillian were. Momentarily, the Doctor read desperation and worry in them, as though he knew he was missing his moment.

He kept the man moving backwards, away from Lillian, away from the bake sale, until his back was against a door. He actually then leaned against a door and fumbled for the handle. He twisted it and tried to disappear through the door, but the Doctor wedged his foot in, and followed him through it.

They found themselves in a small gymnasium. The man walked briskly away from him toward another door that most likely led outside. The Doctor reckoned that he meant to go outside and try to come back in through the front, still hoping to catch Lillian.

The Doctor called after him, "You won't be able to get to her. I won't have it. _We_ won't have it."

"Get to whom? What are you talking about?" the man asked, fake laughing.

"You know to whom," he called. "To Mrs. Handler. The game is over."

The man stopped in his tracks. It was as though he hadn't realised until this very moment that the man in the pin-striped suit meant to keep him from his mark.

The Doctor examined him. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm no-one," said the man, his back still to the Doctor. "Absolutely no-one."

"What's your stake in all this?" he wondered. "Why mess with a nice lady like Mrs. Handler?"

"I have nothing against Mrs. Handler," said the man, turning to face the Doctor. The smirk was back, and the manner had gone from trepidation to confidence. The Doctor didn't like it. "In fact, if I'm not mistaken, I'd set out to save her life, before you intervened."

"You didn't answer my question."

"Yeah, I noticed that," he said, her eyes pulled toward the ceiling, as if by string.

"Who are you?" the Doctor asked, one syllable at a time.

The man walked toward him now, and his somewhat reptilian eyes slid over him. "Why don't _you_ tell me?"

The Doctor searched the man. He was utterly unfamiliar. Nothing about his look rang any sorts of bells. He felt at a loss.

He began to pace and shout. "Maybe you're a crusader for good! You're go from time-fold to time-fold, looking for lives to save! You're a philanthropist!"

The man laughed.

"Or maybe you just enjoy chaos, eh?" the Doctor suggested, a little darker this time. "You _must_ know what will happen if Lillian Handler doesn't get home in time to meet the postman today! You have flouted every diversion thrown your way, in order to get here."

"Except you," the man said, looking him over again.

"So you _want_ the Earth to fall to the Rehengese? You _want_ the human race _not_ to expand into an empire that will reach stars they can't even see yet?"

The man shrugged with exhaustion. "It's not about what I want."

The Doctor squinted at him. "What are the Rehengese giving you in exchange for this? Eh? Money? Power? They're letting you live?"

"It doesn't matter now."

At that point, as if on cue, the door through which they had come opened. Martha stuck her head in. "Lillian's on her way home."

The man turned and seemed to contemplate dashing out the door opposite.

"Don't even think about it," the Doctor said. "There's two of us, and only one of you. We don't look like much, but if nothing else, we can run. And you're wearing slippery Italian shoes, mate."

The man bored holes into the both of them with her eyes. He walked toward them then, and smiled mirthlessly. He squeezed himself through the door past Martha and walked calmly down the hall, through another side door leading outside. Martha watched him take a turn, then disappear completely.

"Who is he?"

"Not certain," the Doctor said honestly, walking across the gym. "But if I had a guess, I'd say a dupe. Some guy who got bullied or bribed into distracting Lillian until an appointed time."

"Does he know what would happen?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Maybe. Probably. He may not care."

* * *

As Martha began stacking little plates of cake into a special Tupperware carrier, she glanced up and saw the Doctor disappear with the Man in Black, through a door adjacent to the school entry way.

"So, what are you raising money for this time?" Martha asked Lillian.

"Oh," said the red-haired lady, chuckling. "The fourth-grade class wants to go to Washington D.C."

"That sounds like a worthy cause," Martha commented. "Will they get there?"

"Well, yes, probably," Lillian answered. "But not because of the bake sale, I can assure you."

The two of them made small talk for two or three minutes, including about Lillian's dress, which caused her to look Martha up and down and wonder aloud whether her jeans and red leather jacket was "the style" for women in London. Martha replied that it was, and added clumsily that she was a musician, hoping it would make her incongruous attire more believable to a 1960's American housewife.

But in the end, it didn't matter. Lillian was happy to be talking to someone who didn't pry, who was friendly and easy to talk to, but seemed to have no ties to the neighbourhood whatsoever. Martha made sure her demeanour was casual, pleasant and non-probative. She reckoned she'd be the last person with whom Lillian interacted, other than George McPhail, in her life, so she wanted to the conversation to be a _good_ experience for her.

The crates had been packed with plates, napkins and the tablecloth and the bungee cords had attached the card table to a luggage cart, Martha got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was nothing like what the Doctor felt as a Time Lord when he came in the vicinity of a fixed point. It was nervousness, a helpless sort of sadness at knowing that this lovely woman was now going to her death. Yes, she had brought the misfortune upon herself somewhat by having the affair at all, but everyone makes mistakes. Although, given the consequences, perhaps _time_ had intervened there, too.

"Thank you so much," Lillian chirped.

"You're welcome," Martha said. She realised she still had an extra bungee cord in her hand. She handed it back, and when Lillian took it, Martha took her hand in both of hers. This startled her, and their eyes met. "You're a nice lady. And a good person."

"Thank you," Lillian said, uneasily.

"Really. A _good_ person." She tried to be sincere, but not too intense.

Lillian's face softened into a smile. "Thank you," she said.

Martha let go of her hand, and watched her walk out the front of the school. She trudged over to the door through which she'd seen the Doctor go, hoping he'd be there, detaining the Man in Black. He was.

She opened the door. "Lillian's on her way home," she said.

* * *

 **Don't forget to review! Let's do it for Lillian!**


	13. Chapter 13

**This is, I believe the second-to-last chapter! Gasp! I've really enjoyed writing this one... more than the last few. I have gotten attached to Lillian myself, as well as Diane, and even, to some extent, George. Awwww, mem'ries..**

 **When we left off, the Doctor had confronted some guy who had derailed the "fixed point," the explosion at Lillian's house in 1966, and chased him out the other side of the school, presumably not giving him time to head off Lillian before she gets home. Martha became the last person Lillian speaks to before George comes round and detonates his bomb.**

 **We discovered the nature of the fixed point, as connected to the Armageddon happening in 2008, and how, as the date of the Rehengese invasion grows closer, time is attempting to repair itself in the form of a time fold converged upon Lillian's house. This is what's been causing the postman to knock on the door in 1966 and someone to answer it in 2008. We realized that Barry Hargreaves would not be born now, because George, his father, is set to die today, thus never ushering in the Rehegese attack in 2008. We also learned that somehow, because Lillian and George do not survive today, Olivia Paulsen will now exist and be free to treat her autistic patients, some of whom do wonders to advance the human race.**

 **And now Lillian is on her way home from the bake sale... :-(**

 **This chapter will take a bit of a crazy turn! But not that crazy, when one considers what the Doctor did on Mars!**

 **Enjoy!**

* * *

XIII

Hand-in-hand, both with sadness in their hearts, the Doctor and Martha walked out the gymnasium door into the sunlight. About half a block away, they could see Lillian Handler in her pink dress, heading home, pulling a small luggage cart behind her, laden with a card table and two crates.

"Now what?" Martha asked.

"Now we wait," he said, swallowing some large, conflicted emotion.

"We just stand here and wait to hear an explosion?"

In lieu of an answer, he looked at her with exhaustion.

"Come on," she said, pulling his hand. "Let's be with her."

"Be with her?'

"Yes," Martha insisted. "If she's going to die in a blaze of passion and household chemicals, and we are going to help it happen, the least we can do is not just _avert our eyes_."

"You want to watch?"

"I don't _want_ any of it to be happening, but as long as it's going to…" she insisted, pulling again.

He conceded, and followed her, without saying anything.

They crossed the street and followed Lillian about a half-block behind. It was about two minutes before she was home, and had stepped inside, and shut the door.

"Can we hide behind the Ford Fairlane?" Martha asked.

"Seems as good a plan as any," the Doctor said.

They snuck up the driveway across the street from Lillian's house, and ducked in front of the mint-green car that had helped them realise, in 2008, that they were looking into two different time periods. This put several tons of steel between them and the bomb.

Martha looked at her watch, and saw that it was five minutes after noon; George McPhail would be coming to call in about six minutes.

At this point, the woman next door to Lillian, the one with whom George would verily flirt before making the fatal knock, came outside in her bonnet and sunglasses with her pruning clippers in-hand. She began trimming her roses, humming just a bit.

"There she is," the Doctor muttered. "At least he sends her inside before he..."

After a few beats, Martha looked up at the red brick house they were crouching in front of.

"Didn't Diane say her friend lived here?" she asked, in a whisper.

"Yeah. Barbara, with the gossipy mother."

"Funny she knew about George and the Avon lady around the corner, but never realised what was going on right across the street," Martha mused.

"Maybe she did know," said the Doctor.

"Don't you think if she knew, there would have been hens clucking all over the neighbourhood, and _Lillian_ would have realised that they knew? They would have _wanted_ her to know that they knew!"

"I suppose you're right," he said. "I wonder what would have happened if she'd known. I mean, what Lillian would have done. Ended the affair?"

"Moved out of the neighbourhood in disgrace?"

"Yeah," he sighed. "But it makes me wonder…" He got that faraway look in his eye.

"What? I hate when you do that."

"It makes me wonder… what _really_ would have happened if the whole neighbourhood had known? _Would_ Lillian have moved away? Would the whole family have had to move?"

"Well, I reckon she'd move away with her kids," Martha said. "Her husband could stay behind as the injured party."

"But he knew about the affair, Martha, and he didn't leave her, nor ask her to leave."

"So he'd have gone with her," she speculated. "Forgiven her as he might, and then they'd start anew someplace else, with the understanding that she would stop cheating, and he would try to provide more excitement. They'd both work on their marriage."

He smiled at her. "You're a very twenty-first century thinker. I admire that." After a couple minutes' pause, the Doctor whispered, "Unless John Handler, at least partly, kept the marriage going for the sake of appearances. I mean, divorce is still quite frowned-upon in 1966."

Martha didn't have a chance to answer, before seeing movement out of the corner of her eye on the right. George McPhail was turning onto Niagara Street. He delivered a few pieces of post to the first house, and the approached the house next door to the Handler house. As they had seen him do before, he stopped and had a good flirt with the Handlers' bonneted neighbour. He eventually gave her the letters and she went inside.

George waited, and stared at Lillian's house, steeling himself. Martha grabbed onto the Doctor's arm and dug her fingernails into the pinstriped fabric. "Oh, my God," she groaned quietly.

The postman went up the short walkway to the Handlers' front door, and he knocked.

Lillian opened the door.

There was a few minutes' exchange, which the Doctor and Martha could not hear. However, they saw George gesture into the house, asking to come in, and they saw Lillian put out a subtle hand of defence, telling him not to enter.

"See? She's not weak!" Martha whispered. "She's standing her ground!"

Lillian stood with her arms crossed, against the door jamb, trying to look as casual as possible. They understood that she and the postman were both tempering their tone and volume so as not to arouse the prying eyes and ears of neighbours.

And then they saw George fall to his knees on the front porch, sobbing. Lillian bent awkwardly to try and help. She looked up and down the block to see if anyone was watching. She put her hands on his shoulders, and they could now hear her saying, "George! Come on now, George! Stand up… this isn't funny."

"I don't get it," Martha said. "Why is she stronger today than she would have been on Monday? Why can she tell him _no_ now, but not three days from now, when he comes back, and they just pick up where they left off? Why is _he_ so emotional for one day only? Why is he at his wit's end with her now, and he wouldn't have been on Monday? Why is _today_ the anomaly?"

Really, she thought she knew the answer: fixed point. This day is simply anomalous.

Anomalous in the grand scheme of time and space. In the lives of the McPhail and Handler families. In the history of this planet. Fixed points are like that – they don't have to fit in, they just have to _be_.

She didn't truly expect the Doctor to answer, but she looked up at him anyway, and found him staring fixedly at the scene. His eyes were wide, his breathing was laboured.

Just now, he could clearly see George's shaking hand move toward the edge of the package he was carrying. The moment was now. The package would be open in a few seconds, and the lives of two people would be obliterated.

Many things went through the Doctor's mind at a dizzying speed. Barbara's gossipy mother. John Handler and his forgiveness of his wife. Lillian's disposition and paranoia. Barry Hargreaves and his Avon Lady mum. Olivia Paulsen. Barbara's mother. John Handler… 1966. Disgrace…

Eighty-two-year-old Lillian's voice in his head, asking him to fix her problem so she can go back and live in her house, and his promise that he would jump at any opportunity to make that happen…

He pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket, and from across the street, squinted hard and aimed it at the package, barely visible to him in George's shaking hands.

And when the postman's fingers slid between the lid and the box, they heard him sob even harder than before.

And yet when the box opened, nothing happened.

George had his eyes shut tight, bracing for something that no-one could brace for… but there was nothing. Not even a little buzz nor a spark came from the package.

They heard Lillian's voice ask a question that could have been, "What the hell is that?"

And then they heard George's voice yelling out curses. He cried out with frustration, kicking the front step, slamming his fists against the screen door.

Lillian, again, looked up and down the street to see if anyone was noticing the noise. She took a step backwards into the house and made to shut the door. She said a few words to George as he continued to lament loudly the downfall of his plan. He was half crying, half yelling, undoubtedly frustrated that not only could ne not have the woman he wanted, but he couldn't kill the both of them just now either. How to live in such misery?

Lillian shut the door, then shut the front curtains of her house, so as to keep out any prying eyes, including, and especially, it seemed, George's. George spent a minute or so banging on the front door, but then he seemed to shake it off. He turned and looked up and down the block, the way Lillian had, seemingly wondering if anyone was watching. After a few moments, he walked away, dejected, and he reminded Martha of a chastised child. He was upset, confused, wondering what to do next.

"What did you do?" Martha whispered.

"I disarmed the bomb," the Doctor answered. "What does it look like I did?"

"But…," she protested. "All that noise about fixed points! I thought they were meant to die."

George delivered the post to the next house, and then, when he returned to the sidewalk, he stared in wonder at the Handler house, seemingly in awe that it was still there. He opened the package again, and inspected the mechanism briefly.

"You're never going to find what's wrong with it," the Doctor said to him under his breath. "It's neutralised with sonic waves. You won't see it in a million years."

And indeed, George closed the box and moved on to the next house, and then the next.

When he turned the corner, Martha stood up straight and asked, "So, now he just… what? Moves on with his life and finishes his route? Goes bowling afterwards with the boys, like he didn't almost die by his own hand today? Like he didn't come within a hair's breadth of killing a good woman and levelling her house?"

"I guess so. He's a volatile man, Martha."

"He'll write off today as a time when he almost made a terrible mistake?"

"Hopefully," he said, moving down the driveway, and turning right, heading back to the TARDIS.

"Jesus," Martha groaned, walking after him. "How can anyone have mood swings that extreme? One minute you're sure you want to kill yourself because you can't have who you want, and the next, you're calmly finishing out your work day, never to have a homicidal incident again!"

"Don't forget, there are more things at work here than just George's disposition," he reminded her.

"All the more reason why this is completely mad!" she practically shouted. Then, exasperated, she grabbed his shoulder, forced him to stop, and begged, "Doctor, please tell me you had an actual _reason_ for what you did."

"'Course I did," he told her calmly, squinting against the noonday sun.

"You didn't just lose your nerve? At the last second, decided you just couldn't see them blown up?"

"There was more to it than that."

"So we went through a whole rigmarole to set a fixed point back on track, and then you derailed it again."

"Shh, you'll attract attention," he warned, before beginning to walk again. "I didn't derail it, I just moved it."

"Moved it to when? By the time George next comes back, it's Monday, and he's over it, remember? He just goes back in and picks up where he left off with Lillian."

"Okay, so I moved it, and changed it," he said.

He was ploughing forward with a scowl, seriousness covering his features like a dark cloud.

"I don't understand."

"I have a theory."

"About what?"

"About the warped morality of the mid-1960's as they pertain to… married people in the suburbs."

She waited until they were back in the TARDIS, because she didn't fancy continuing to trail behind him, asking questions to which he was giving partial, non-committal, distracted answers.

"Okay," she said, once they were in the console room. "Talk to me, mister. How can _even you_ just change a fixed point? If you can feel them in your gut, and they make you sick... you are a slave to these things, Doctor, I've been seeing it unfold over the last few days."

"That's somewhat true," he said. "And it's definitely what I was taught. But Time Lords... most of them never thought outside the box."

"So you're saying that you made the event… something else? Something other than an explosion? And what's all this about morality?"

"Martha, it's 1966. You heard Lillian talk about how paranoid she was. In all of that business with George, what was her greatest fear, do you think?"

"People finding out."

"Which people?"

"People in the neighbourhood," she said.

"More specifically?"

"I dunno. Maybe Barbara's mum, across the street?"

"Right. Why wasn't she terrified of her husband finding out?"

"She was," said Martha. "She talked about it yesterday, when she was trying to break it off with George. She didn't want her husband or daughter to know."

"But eighty-two-year-old Lillian," he said. "Yes, she cried once she realised that her husband knew all along. But when she talked about the affair in retrospect, what came through loud and clear? Her most pervasive, deepest-seated fear, at this time in her life? The thing that was probably always at the forefront of her mind? _Others_ finding out."

"Okay, sure," Martha conceded. "She had a fear of disgrace. A woman in her position, in this era, maybe couldn't recover from that."

"Why would she be more afraid of her neighbours finding out than her husband? And mind you, he knew, and decided to forgive her, and never let her know that he knew. Why would he do that? Why wouldn't he leave, and try to find someone else?"

"He loved her. And it was probably more trouble than it was worth to get a divorce. Yet another source of disgrace. He'd want to avoid that sort of thing, just as she would."

"Right. So, as I said, I have a theory," he said. "And I must admit, right now, I'm banking _a lot_ on a hunch."

"A hunch?"

"Yeah. But to be fair, it _is_ the hunch of a Time Lord, concerning a fixed point in time and strings that attach to it in all different directions, so that's got to be worth something, eh? But I told Lillian I'd get her back into her house if I could work out a way, and I think I've worked out a way to do it without letting anyone die horribly. Actually, she may not be able to live in that house anymore, but she _will_ live. Can't have everything, eh?"

"Okay. This is kind of mad."

"Yeah, but my gut tells me I have got a shot."

Martha sighed and put her arms out at her sides to signify surrender. "What do you need from me?"

"Not sure yet," he said, throwing the TARDIS into gear, and attempting to move her.

She gave a groan that was slower and sicklier than her usual.

"What's that?" Martha wondered, looking into the Time Rotor, worried.

"She's resisting," the Doctor said. "Time is still fractured for now, because the fixed point, as far as anyone is concerned, has been derailed yet again. Moving on this time line and messing with it more… the TARDIS doesn't like it."

"Where are we going?"

"Forward, three days," he said.

"Why?"

But the Doctor was distracted. He stroked the console. "It's okay, old girl. We're going to fix everything, but you have to let me do it, yeah? A little trust? What do you say?"

He tried again, and the TARDIS made the same weak, discordant sound, but she allowed them to travel through time slightly, seventy-two hours into the future. He threw the hand-brake into place, and looked at Martha with some trepidation.

"Okay, here comes the new fixed point," he said. "Monday, 16 May, 1966, probably sometime just after noon."

"That's when Lillian says George comes back, and they just… resume the shagging."

"Right," said the Doctor. "I'm operating on the assumption that he will still do that, even though things went a little differently this time. He actually _made contact_ with Lillian on Friday when he tried to deliver the package, actually tried to blow them both up, and didn't succeed. In the reality that Lillian told us about in 2008, he didn't make contact. There was no _second_ rejection, there was no sobbing, no coming to the end of his rope enough to detonate…Anyway, hopefully, even now that we've meddled, he can get past it well enough over the weekend, that he'll just come right back and recommence trying to possess her for a while. Maybe he'll be a bit less discreet about it, which will serve us well."

"I don't really understand why George wouldn't come back later and try again to detonate the bomb. Or on a different day. Feelings as strong as those don't just dissipate in a few minutes' time. Why does it have to be Friday the 13th at noon, or never?"

"Other than the fact that it's fixed point, and _time itself_ says so? There's really no telling, Martha. No accounting for what happens in the human heart. Other than, perhaps, a volatile man _will_ change his mind drastically from one moment to the next. And Lillian sort of implied that they didn't have another break-up that was quite as memorable as that first one, so he probably never felt desperate quite that way again. Then, eventually, he just got tired of her himself, or so it would seem."

"Ugh," Martha groaned. "I feel sorry for George again. It's like he's being _used_ by time."

"Well, it happens to the best of us," the Doctor said. Then he held out his hand. "Come on."

He led her down the ramp toward the door. "What are we doing to do?"

"We're going to throw a rock at a window."

"Excuse me?"

* * *

Once again, they crouched between the front of the Ford Fairlane in Barbara's family's driveway, and their garage door, putting the car between them and the Handler house. The Doctor searched the ground for something, and seemed to find what he was looking for: three small, porous lava rocks.

"For the window?" Martha asked, sardonically, still having no idea why he was doing any of this.

He nodded, and crouched again beside her, concentrating.

When George came around the corner, neither of them said anything, they simply watched. Before going up the path to Lillian's door, he seemed to go through most of the letters in his bag first, and put certain groups of them in different pockets. He checked his watch, and started up the path.

He knocked on the door.

In quick succession, the Doctor threw all three rocks at the front window of Barbara's mother's house. Within five seconds, an angry-looking woman appeared in the window, wondering who or what was thudding against the glass. The Doctor and Martha pressed themselves against the garage door, in a spot where the Doctor could lean out ever so slightly and see the woman, in hopes that she would be too riveted by the scene across the street to look to her left and see him.

"There she is," the Doctor muttered. "Prying eyes and all."

"You're starting a rumour!"

"Is it still a rumour if it's the truth?"

"I dunno… but now the whole neighbourhood is going to know!"

Indeed, Barbara's mother looked just in time to see Lillian Handler open the door across the street. Her air was demure but slightly dramatic – she seemed both vexed and anticipatory about seeing George. Her manner was not indicative of a woman who was simply greeting the postman and inviting him in for tea and lemon cookies. George stood with his arms crossed over his chest, and most of his weight on one hip, talking to her. She responded from time to time, sometimes with a fond smile, and sometimes with a cautious expression. And, both of them seemed to be softening, in the wake of Friday's incident. Subtly, he reached out and took her hand, and another few moments went by. Eventually, Lillian invited him in, and when she shut the door, the two of them were staring at each other intently, probably more demonstrative than they had ever before dared to be, out in the open.

"I wonder what they're going to do now," Martha mused with a chuckle, after they heard the door click.

The Doctor leaned forward and dared a glance at the woman in the window. Barbara's mother was riveted there, and watched with fascination as the curtains of Lillian's house closed abruptly. Her jaw was agape with shock, but her eyes twinkled with the titillating scandal.

"Oh, Barbara's mum is wondering the same thing," the Doctor whispered. "I hope I'm not projecting when I say, she looks like she just can't bloody wait to tell someone."

"I hate people like that."

"Yeah, but she's going to save the universe with her flapping gums. Or at the very least, Lillian and George."

"How's your gut?"

"Surprisingly quiet."

* * *

 **Is it safe to say that this chapter didn't end the way you thought it would? Hope you enjoyed it anyway!**

 **The next chapter will answer some of your questions because I imagine you're making a "WTF" face right about now!**

 **One way or another, don't forget to leave a review!**


	14. Chapter 14

**Well, this is the final chapter! This story started out, in my head, with a gimmick: two windows in the same house that give a view of two different time periods, and it takes a Time Lord to notice. But it turned into something that became surprisingly emotional for me. As I've said, I got rather attached to Lillian, and even to George, in his rough-hewn way. Even more so than usual, Martha's emotions in the last few chapters, as she's reacted to what she knew needed to be done, reflected my own.**

 **This chapter represents resolution. It is a look at the big-picture, as far as all the players, and how things turn out, after the Doctor meddled with a fixed point in time. Two people lived past May 13, 1966 though they were not meant to, but is it all going to be okay? And who are Barry Hargreaves and Olivia Handler-Paulsen in the grand scheme of things? How is John Handler, Lillian's husband, important to the progression of events, once the "fixed point" has been executed? How does Diane wind up? How does Lillian deal with the consequences of her actions?**

 **It definitely has the feel of an epilogue, or a dénouement, if you will. It's a softly smiling, sleepy ending, which I hope you find satisfying. :-)**

 **As usual, I would love to hear from you, so as you finish, please leave me a review. Enjoy!**

* * *

XIV

A fixed point, derailed. Again. This time, at the Doctor's hand. And history changed to include a nosy neighbour who finds out about Lillian Handler and George McPhail's affair, when no-one was ever supposed to know, other than Lillian's decidedly mum-on-the-subject husband.

"How's your gut?" Martha Jones asked of the Time Lord crouched beside her.

"Surprisingly quiet," the Doctor answered.

"So now the fixed point is when Barbara's mother looks outside and sees them?"

"Yes," he said, rather cautiously. He seemed to be waiting for something to happen, perhaps searching his insides for some signs of nausea or other form of temporal disaster-detection.

"But doesn't that mean that Barry Hargreaves still gets born?" she asked. "I mean, I know that George and Lillian shared a few more moments of drama than otherwise they might have, given that George broke down and cried on the front step and they both lived to tell about it… wait, is that what changed everything?"

"No. I shouldn't think so."

"Good. Because, Doctor, I can't really see George, in spite of what he said when Lillian tried to ditch him, staying with her forever, even if she did leave her husband. Let alone being faithful."

"Barry Hargreaves still gets born, because George will continue delivering mail, and his special brand of sleazy seduction, to the bored housewives, and/or Mary Kay ladies, of this neighbourhood. The x-factor is John Handler. What will he do, once Barbara's mum starts spreading it around? Will he be so forgiving of his wife, with the whole world watching?"

"Oh!" Martha said, coming to realisation, though more slowly than she would have liked. "So… Barry still gets born. But he doesn't cause Armageddon for the human race, then?"

"No, he doesn't," the Doctor said, looking at her smugly. He took her hand. "Come on."

They headed back to the TARDIS again, and once more, Martha asked. "Okay, now where are we going?"

"Back to 2008," he said. Monday, 15 September seems like a good enough date, eh? Though, how you fancy San Diego?"

"San Diego?"

He put the TARDIS motion, and the gears ground as usual. Martha didn't like being kept in the dark, but now she was curious enough, and mystified enough, to want to see what was happening.

* * *

They exited the TARDIS on the outskirts of a suburb of what Martha assumed was San Diego, California. The Doctor looked at Martha, smiled, and took her hand.

A white building with one entire side, overlooking a golf course, panelled with windows, stood before them. It was two stories, about the size of a medium-sized mansion, but thoroughly modern. The sign out on the main road to their left said "The Paulsen Institute."

"Wow," Martha said upon reading the sign. Again, she'd been thrown the Olivia Handler-Paulsen curveball. "I don't get it, but lead on anyway!"

They walked down the fifty yards of sidewalk toward the facility, and went through the front door. They were greeted by a young receptionist who seemed reluctant to make eye-contact.

"I'm Dr. Smith, and this is Dr. Jones, we're from the Unified Intelligence Taskforce based in London," he told her, flashing the psychic paper. "We were in the area on business. We're great admirers of Dr. Paulsen and wondered if there was a chance of meeting her. I'd certainly love to shake her hand."

"I'm sorry, you'll have to make an appointment," the young woman said, very meekly. "She doesn't see people on a walk-in basis."

"Well, would we be able to tour the facility?"

The receptionist got on the phone and asked someone unseen whether they had time for a tour today. When she hung up the phone, she said, "Go on through there, and have a seat. Someone will be with you in a moment."

They walked past the desk through an archway and into a wide room whose glass-panelled wall looked out onto the golf course. The room was decorated in both bright and muted blues, with minimalist sofas and geometric-printed rugs. Everything was symmetrical, and Martha wondered if this was for the comfort of the autistic patients, many of whom would have been ill-at-ease in a cluttered room with patterns askew.

The Doctor sauntered around the room and looked at the art on the wall, and every now and then he flashed Martha a big smile that indicated he was proud of himself.

After about a five-minute wait, a door opened and a woman stepped out.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," she said. "Miss Lang told me you'd like a tour?"

Martha stood stunned, staring at the woman. The Doctor, however, was less surprised.

"Yes," said the Doctor, reaching out to shake her hand. He introduced himself and Martha, and reiterated how they were great 'fans' of Dr. Paulsen, and had been following her life and work.

"Nice to meet you," said the woman. "I'm Diane Wesson. I'll be giving you the tour, if that's all right with you."

"Lovely," said the Doctor.

"Yes, lovely," Martha echoed, to cover up for the fact that she had been staring at Diane in stupefied silence.

As the tall, thin, fifty-eight-year-old blonde woman led them across the threshold of the door through which she had come, the Doctor said, "So, Dr. Wesson, does the facility deal only with autistic patients, or are other disorders also treated here?"

Diane laughed. "Oh, you can call me Diane. And, thanks for the compliment, but I'm not a doctor here," she said. "I actually just do PR for Dr. Paulsen. Olivia. She's my sister."

"Oh, really?" asked the Doctor. But Martha could tell that he wasn't surprised.

They stopped in the first room on the right, which contained a number of different computer terminals and what looked like modified MRI machines.

"Well, half-sister," said Diane. "Same dad, different mom. Now, here we are in the initial exam area…"

She went on to explain the work done in this room by Dr. Paulsen and her colleagues, but Martha wasn't listening. The dots were connecting. Olivia Handler-Paulsen was John Handler's daughter!

The Doctor had asked what John Handler would do if the whole neighbourhood found out about the affair? Could he forgive his wife, if everyone knew she'd made a fool of him?

Apparently not. Apparently, he would save face, divorce her, and go on to have a daughter with someone else, presumably his second wife.

If the bomb had gone off, he'd have been left a widow, and done the same. Though, this way, the human race gets the benefit of Olivia Paulsen's expertise, and that of her genius patients who would perform leaps and bounds of advancement, but Lillian and George didn't have to die in a hail of sparks and fire.

And Martha now understood what might have happened to Barry Hargreaves, whose rakish postman father survived the fixed point and lived to conceive him. She saw in these moments why he would never unravel the Earth's firewalls and let in the Rehengese attack.

Diane led them out of the room and down the hall to a room that seemed to have machines that measured electrodes.

In this room, sitting against the wall in a chair, reading a magazine, there was a balding man, wearing a red plaid button-up shirt and khaki trousers. Martha nearly gasped when she saw him.

"Oh, hello, Barry," Diane said to him, with some surprise. "Sorry – are you waiting for Dr. Paulsen?"

"Yeah, but it's okay," Barry Hargreaves said, looking up his magazine and smiling. "I'm enjoying this article about someone named Britney Spears. Apparently she was a singer at one time, and had sort of a meltdown last year. Really interesting stuff."

Diane chuckled, then introduced Barry to the Doctor and Martha. "Barry is one of Olivia's success stories," she explained. "Off-the-charts IQ, but ten years ago he was almost incapable of making eye-contact or understanding the nuances of human body language. These days, he's… well…"

"Almost normal," Barry said, amiably, with a smile.

"Normal?" asked the Doctor, just as amiably. "Aw, I doubt that!"

"Well," Diane said, understanding the Doctor's meaning. "Hardly any of our patients are what one would call _normal,_ exactly. They are extraordinary. Barry is working on some kind software development for Homeland Security."

"Mrs. Wesson, please!" Barry exclaimed. Then he tapped the side of his nose. "Wish I could discuss it, but I can't. You understand."

"You could tell us, but you'd have to kill us?" the Doctor joked.

Barry smiled. "Yes, exactly."

"Well, good luck with that," said the Doctor.

"Would you like to know something interesting?" Diane asked, with a big smile.

"Always," the Doctor answered.

"Barry and I grew up in the same neighbourhood in Colorado!" she said.

"You don't say," the Doctor commented.

"It's true," Barry confirmed, happily. "We lived maybe a block and a half from each other, though, I think, never at the same time."

"That's right. I moved with my mother to Arizona in 1966, and Barry wasn't born until '68. But still, small world, eh?"

"Very small, indeed," the Time Lord agreed. Then he scrunched his nose and asked, "Why Arizona? Seems a bit hot."

"I'm not entirely sure," Diane said with a shrug. "It's just where my mother decided to go, after she and my dad split. I guess because there's no snow."

Then, enthusiastically, the Doctor asked, "So if your parents split up, and your mum moved away, did your dad stay in the house? I mean, Barry, did you grow up just a block away from Dr. Paulsen? That would be remarkable!"

Barry shook his head, but it was Diane who answered. "That _would_ be remarkable, but Olivia was born across town, in Lakewood."

"Okay, wait. Olivia Paulsen… same dad, different mum… same dad, different mum…" the Doctor mused aloud, pretending to be making a connection. "So… is your mother's name Lillian... something?"

"Lillian McArdle, yes. Sorry, how'd you know that?"

"I met her once, a while back, when I was in town, and I mentioned Dr. Paulsen's work. She told me about her own kinda-sorta connection to Dr. Paulsen," he said, waving her question away, with a gesture that seemed to say _too complicated to explain_. It did not escape Martha's notice that the Doctor had said _in town_ , though had not specified what town. "Ex-husband's daughter, she said."

Diane chuckled. "Yeah, actually, mom and Olivia get along pretty well."

"How is she?" the Doctor wondered.

"Oh, um… just fine," she said. "Still living in Scottsdale with husband number three."

"Right, right," the Doctor sighed. "What's his name again?"

"Alan," she said. "Al. Coming up on twenty years' marriage now. He still works, but she spends her days golfing and baking."

"Baking, you say," the Doctor chuckled. "That's fantastic."

"Yep. And she's eighty-two, but she can still play nine holes… only in the fall and winter now, though."

"It's good to keep one's youth about one, even at an advanced age," he commented, winking at Martha.

Diane laughed. "That's for sure. And no one understands that better than my mother. At least now. It took her three marriages to realise that she needed a man twenty years younger! Al is sixty-three – just a few years older than I am! She's joined a mother-daughter golf group, of all things. Neither my sister nor I can be there in Scottsdale on a weekly basis, but her step-daughter goes with her…"

* * *

Over the next half-hour, they toured the facility with Diane (and with Barry Hargreaves in tow, tagging along, commenting once in a while), and had learned from her quite a few of the details that they had missed. According to Diane, Lillian had "gone for a breather" in Arizona after "some rumours" had got started in their old neighbourhood. John, her dad, was "vexed, to say the least" by the rumours and they decided to go their separate ways for good. Lillian had remarried, within a year, a man with "more money than brains," but she found that she just didn't like him very much, so they divorced not long after. She'd met Al McArdle at a rally in Phoenix for Walter Mondale, and they married in 1989, just before Diane's father died of cancer.

John Handler had stayed in the house on Niagara Street for two years after being "vexed" by the rumours about Lillian. In 1968, he married the only other female accountant at his firm, moved to a suburb on the west side of Denver, and they had Olivia in 1970. He died with his second wife holding his hand, and Lillian had come back to Denver for the funeral, but other than that, she had not returned to Colorado.

Diane had commented more than once on how odd it was that she was so forthcoming with information, and that something about the Doctor (and Martha) was familiar. Maybe they just had trustworthy faces, she speculated with a friendly shrug. She also asked the Doctor once again _how_ he knew her mother, and he made up something about having spoken at a "society thing" in Scottsdale, not figuring it out of the realm of possibility that Lillian would have become involved with a cotillion or a country club. Diane nodded, and named some sort of heritage group to which Lillian belonged, and the Doctor went along with it.

In addition, the Doctor, with Diane's help, had got Barry Hargreaves talking a bit. He had been born in 1968 in that same neighbourhood in Denver, never having known his father. Eventually, they, too, were "forced" out of the neighbourhood because of rumours, and they had gone to Texas, where his mother could work in the Mary Kay corporate office. They had moved back to Colorado when he was in college, and he'd taken his Ph.D. from the School of Mines. He had never been officially diagnosed with Autism, but when Olivia Handler (later Paulsen) set up an autism study as a part of her doctoral dissertation about ten years before, Barry's mother had heard about it, and wondered if it was something that could help her very interesting son. The study began at the University of Denver, and moved to San Diego, following funding.

"The rest is history," he said, with an easy shrug. "My treatment still isn't complete – I don't know if it will ever be complete – but at least I'm functioning."

"More than functioning, I should think," the Doctor said with a smile.

* * *

"You were awfully quiet in there," the Doctor said to Martha, as they retired, once again, to the TARDIS.

"I'm stunned," she said. "Stunned into silence." She was still quite meek and contemplative.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," she said, with a smile. "I'm okay. Every life was saved… all you had to do was start a rumour."

"Well, bending the laws of time and space doesn't always work out, as you might have imagined. But, you know… who else are they going to obey, if not me?"

"Apart from themselves? An excellent question," she responded. Then, she seemed to think for a moment before asking, "So… you and I remember both timelines because we were at the epicentre of it… just like when you turned back time after the Master. But what about Larry? And Colonel Compton?"

"I reckon they won't remember," said the Doctor. "They weren't in it like we were. They were sitting in a truck watching CNN."

"Only because you told them to."

"Can you imagine that lot trundling into Lillian and George's world with us?"

"Yes, I can. And it's chaos."

"Right, so… they don't really need to know. I mean, I suppose we can tell Larry about it because he's sort of like family but…"

"So, UNIT did all this work, sent operatives to the scene and everything, and they will have no idea that any of it even occurred?"

"Yep. It's happened before. Officially, in cases like this, I'm supposed to report to UNIT and fill out paperwork, even though from their point of view, there was no incident at all. Time has been repaired, and there's no need for UNIT to get involved in the life of Lillian Handler – or whatever her name is now – in this reality."

"But they want you to go and do the reports and all that, anyway?"

"Yes," he said. "But I'm not going to. Never have before."

She chuckled. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Because I just took a fixed point and turned it on its ear, and saved the Earth anyway," he said, putting on the air of _boastful_. "Because you know at heart that I'm a Rogue Time Lord." He winked.

"You really are," she said, leaning against the console coolly with her arms crossed over her chest. "And it's surprisingly un-scary."

"See?" He struck much the same pose, only against the railing. "No rules. Sometimes that's the way you've got to play it."

She smiled at him with disbelief, and perhaps a touch of admiration. But then, slowly, the smile faded, and she began to walk slowly, contemplatively, around the console. He just watched her.

After two laps, he asked, "Penny for your thoughts?"

"Won't there be repercussions, Doctor?"

"There usually are," he told her. "But I'm willing to accept them, to save Lillian's life."

"What sort of repercussions will there be?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "There might still be something of a time-loop localised on Niagara Street someplace. Although, I would doubt that time would find any reason to _fold_ again, like it did. There might be, say, a hole in someone's garden where things disappear, or maybe the lady next door will find that since that day, she can't make her roses grow because they're stuck on a two-day cycle."

"Would Lillian recognise us?"

"Maybe, because she saw us at the bake sale," he said. "But that's forty-two years' worth of angst and other memories getting in the way. She'd have no reason to associate us with what happened with her and George, and Barbara's mum finding out about it."

"She remembered the Man in Black."

"Because he scared her," the Doctor said. "You… well, you didn't scare her, I should think. Though, sometimes people remember folks who are exceptionally nice to them."

"I tried," she said. After a pause, she asked, "Who _was_ the Man in Black, Doctor?"

He took a deep breath. "I'm not sure," he said. "I got a _human_ vibe off him, but I've been wrong about that before."

"How or why would a human try to unravel a fixed point? That's just… bonkers."

"My guess is that he was hired by the Rehengese," he said. "Or threatened into doing it."

"Wow."

"I asked him what was in it for him, and he didn't answer," the Doctor explained. "I wondered if his reward was simply that he gets to live… and he didn't deny it."

"Uh-oh."

"Yeah," he sighed. "But he didn't confirm it either, nor deny any of the other stuff I said. So, I don't know."

"Can we find out about him? Make sure that the Rehengese didn't murder his whole family, just because he didn't complete his mission for them?"

"We can look into it, Martha, but I'm not sure if we'll be able to do anything about it."

"Because, what if we saved two lives, but destroyed a bunch of others? Technically, we could have let him accomplish his mission, and still have alerted Barbara's mum to the affair, and there would have been no harm, no foul."

"We could have," he agreed. "But we didn't know it at the time. And for us to fix it now would mean crossing our own timelines. Doing something like that so close to a fixed point would…"

"I know, I know," she said. "Even I can feel that _that_ would be a disaster."

"But we _can_ try and find out who he was, and try and intervene if the Rehengese mess with him. After the fact, of course."

"Can we?"

"We can. You're a very kind woman, Dr. Jones."

She shrugged. "First do no harm."

He smiled and moved toward the console, and pulled her in for a hug. At the same time, he threw the TARDIS into gear, moving them on to their next investigative destination.

END

* * *

 ***Sniff* Genuinely sad this is over. Thanks for reading! Don't forget to let me know your thoughts!**


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